Beneath the Shadow
by cantilatrix
Summary: The Battle for Winterfell ends in one, long, night. The victor is not humanity. Bran Stark commits crimes the Children could not have conceived of to give the world a final chance at surviving the Others, and passes the responsibility of saving Westeros to a man nobody would have chosen. Jaime Lannister wakes on the day King Robert comes to Winterfell.
1. The Walls of Winterfell

**Jaime**

* * *

Jaime shifts his boots in the Winterfell mud, feels one unstick and one sink in deeper. He does not turn his head, he keeps his eyes firmly on the distance; but he sways a little to the left, just to brush against Brienne's armour.

"Do you pray to a god?" he asks.

He can feel more than see her indignation. "What?" she enunciates, with all the familiar vitriol. It's not such a terrible thing to hear, at the last. He keeps his eyes fixed on the horizon. No man would pitch a battle on this dark a night; the braziers keeping it barely light enough to see each other seemed unable to light the battlefield more than ten meters ahead of them.

"I don't know what they worship on Tarth," Jaime says. "I would guess the Seven, but I've never once heard you pray to them."

Brienne doesn't reply for so long that he almost gives up on hearing it, but as the wind whistles across the braziers, picks up sparks and litters them across those standing on the front line, she finally speaks.

"I don't pray, much," she says, "but I like the old gods."

"You like them?"

"They're simple. A god for trees, a god for lakes." She shrugs one shoulder; he can hear her pauldron shifting against itself. "I prefer it."

A moment passes, sparks flying, and then she adds:

"And I hated praying to the Maiden."

There are jokes to be made there, of the infamous Maid of Tarth, and all of them make him bite his tongue, lightly, just to make sure there's no way he can say them. The man who would have said those jokes was only a few years behind him, not far enough behind to make him not think of the jokes to start with. He brushes up against her again, hoping that she doesn't realise it's an apology.

If she does, she doesn't comment on it.

"What about yourself, Ser Jaime?" she asks.

Jaime hums absently, chewing at his tongue a little while considering the answer. He's starting to feel the crushing weight of the darkness ahead of them. His legs are starting to shake in the way they used to back when he was green, back when he'd never faced a man in battle before.

He supposes he's never faced a dead man before.

"Gods don't tend to answer the prayers I send," he says, and leaves it at that. "But halfway through a battle I always pray to the Warrior. Or swear at him that I'll find him after the battle and tear him limb from limb, but I find that it's all the same."

He can hear her huff out laughter, and the sound is— heartening. At least he's going to die funny.

"May the Warrior give strength to your sword arm, then."

Jaime grimaces, can feel the half-sensation of closing a right hand around a sword where there's only empty space and gold freezing itself to his wrist.

"And the Warrior knows I need it."

They're silent, then, for a long moment, and Jaime entertains the notion that the wildling had been wrong, and that nothing at all would attack tonight. They could curse him, laugh, go to bed tonight.

Go to bed with each other.

The thought rises higher and higher as he tries to tamp it back down to wherever it came from, but the image is already forming, like a fight with an opponent he's only seen. He shifts his sword in his hand a little more, tries to flex his right hand as well just to distract him from the thoughts. The phantom pain it causes isn't quite worth it, but it does get him to focus up.

Somewhere in the distance, there is a sound.

He supposes the sound must have been happening for a while, and for so long the nervous chatter of thousands of men fearing death had drowned it out. But there it was. This soft scraping sound. It seems to be coming from everywhere at once, and as it starts to get louder, the whispers of the men around him diminish to harsh breathing, clouds of steam in the air.

It's coming from ahead.

He can hear a Dothraki call, and then one of the Unsullied yells in Valyrian, and then the sound of ten thousand horses fills the air, joined by the screams of the horselords, and then-

The heat and light of ten thousand swords aflame. Impossible and there.

He has to squint away from it, and he blinks over at Pod, shielding his face, and then to Brienne, who is looking to them both. They exchange a momentary glance, that seems to mean more than just _looking_ at each other, gods know what, whatever gods know how to light fires on steel, and then they turn away.

The Dothraki charge, beacons lighting the way ahead, and suddenly Jaime can see for hundreds of yards, the backs of the screamers as they flow like a wave into the sea. Flaming missiles spiral overhead, painting the treeline orange, and the Dothraki come in to the same place the trebuchets are firing to-

And the wave breaks.

Ten thousand swords dim into darkness. Jaime follows the progress of the last few swords that spin from left to right and sputter into nothing, moving at first with the speed of the horse and then with the zig-zagging of a man, and then wrenched here and there and gone.

It's crushingly dark again.

Behind him, Jaime can hear the men begin to shudder, talk, ask each other _did you see that_, and Jaime wants to do the same but there's no damn point when everyone saw that, and everyone knows what it means.

One or two horses ride back, pushed sideways by the crowd standing ahead of them. They are without a rider, and on some, their saddles are torn and dragging beneath them. A horse, fifty or so yards to the right, some dappled steed, tangles its legs in the shredded leather and goes down hard, screaming.

Some merciful wildling steps forward— bearded, hair glinting red-blonde in the brazier light, Tormund; and hits at its straining neck with his axe, and the screaming stops. Jaime nods over at him but he doesn't think Tormund catches it. Tormund, that crazy fucker, looks scared.

He can hear the sound again. The scraping sound.

It's much louder, and much closer, and loud enough for him to hear what it sounds like. It's flesh shifting across flesh. The click of bone. The clatter of thousands of legs _running._

Jaime can feel the fear go across the battlefield, and Brienne sinks down into a fighting stance, and she screams- "_Stand your ground!_"- so loud that he almost can't tell what she's saying. Beside him, Pod bristles and levels his dragonglass blade, and he exchanges a look with the boy; almost a man, now, staring back at him with fear and determination, and about to fight his first damn battle against an enemy that—

Through the haze of darkness, movement.

A thick moving wall of flesh, mouths open, eyes blue.

There are so many of them that they seem to just roll over the braziers.

There is a split second between the dead attacking and waiting for it where Jaime is stood in the darkness, sword arm swinging but not hitting, and he can see, just about, the full extent of what he's about to hit.

Or more accurately, what's about to hit him.

_It swarms with hate._

The wave of dead men impacts with his chest, his face, his legs, and he's pushed back as much as he's pulled in, thousands of arms yanking at him as he's lifted off his feet by the sheer force of their momentum. He's pulled into the throng and he doesn't have time to yell, just to push his arms out, metal hand slamming against bone and flesh as he jams his sword into the host of dead. They tip him up by his legs and he's now suspended facing down, and they drop upon him, trap his sword arm beneath him, push his face into the mud, and tear. He feels a hand slough off its flesh as it pulls at his hair, another trying to tear through the skin of the back of his neck, and he scrambles, elbows in and up, pushes them back for just long enough to get his left arm up and swing back, breathe air rather than mud, and now he's standing, barely. They don't stop at any point, just keep moving no matter how much he cuts off or how often he pushes back, and the second he makes space on one side he can feel hands pulling him down on the other. He can't see the battle. He can barely see anything. He can feel the cold air getting colder the longer the wights stay near him. No matter if he fights like he did when he had two hands and the strength of a younger man, he's dying, soon, perhaps in minutes.

He's covered in mud, or flesh. It's cold, and it's freezing against his skin. He can feel his legs shaking, and he might have pissed himself.

None of this seems to matter to the dead, even as he flails his left arm in a swing that cuts off a head and two arms. They aren't fazed if they lose a hand. It'll just keep trying to kill him.

He feels _teeth_ sear against his skull and he slams his metal hand back into it, again and again, but the teeth keep chewing with a broken jaw and its arms have latched onto him, and he screams out in horror, _fuck, fuck, fuck_, and they start pulling him to the ground—

A cry that could have come from the gods. A sword that cleaves the dead man in front of him in two. The wight on his back, his head, is plucked off and flung back like it's made of paper, and he's pulled up and dragged into a sprint.

He barely has time to see as he finds himself joining a crush of men running for their lives, pushing through each other, leaving the slowest to die as they run for the dim lights of Winterfell, but he can feel her presence, hear her comforting grunts of exertion, knows that her eyes will be round and blue and wild with frenzy as she pushes through the men she should be leading forward.

He owes her his life, again, and he knows that he's going to die if he has to save her from the same. He thinks he'll have to do it.

The retreat is wordless, because there's no need to explain why they need to fall back. Jaime pushes and pushes and runs when he finally has the space to, runs through the throng of men being dragged to the ground by the wights that can run almost as fast as they can, perhaps just as fast.

Something tugs at his boot.

He trips a little in the mud and turns back, expects to see the flat blue eyes of a wight. Instead, he looks directly at the wide brown eyes of Pod, trampled into the ground by the retreat, staring up at him with a clear plea, arms still outstretched. Jaime stutters to a halt.

And then the dead swarm and descend on Pod, tear into his face, look up at Jaime with a screaming hunk of flesh in their ragged mouths, and coward_, coward_, he keeps running.

Stopping for however long has cost him the advantage, the dead sprint like their own speed carries their legs. He has to barrel through the churned mud and stamp over the people who have tripped and fallen below him, and he almost stumbles here and there as he is bashed to and fro. Up ahead, as the fires of Winterfell get closer, he can see a tall shock of blonde hair, matted with viscera, and he runs for that hair, crushes across the bridge and almost gets pushed into the dragonglass spikes on one side but sheer bloody determination makes him push back in. He wonders if someone ended up falling on the other side of the bridge, but there's no way to find out. The scream would be lost in the rest of the screaming now.

As he drags himself through the crowd to Brienne, pushes to the castle, he can see now that everyone has broken formation. Unsullied, knights of the Vale, northmen, wildlings. Someone's still manning the trebuchets, but they're effectively firing pebbles into a sea.

Above, as he is swept by the crowd towards the gates of Winterfell, he can see a waving torch, and then a wheeling screech, and the world is _aflame_ behind him, a deep orange, and he makes the desperate mistake of looking back.

The trench is alight and so is the sky, a dragon spearing through the clouds setting the dead aflame. They're _everywhere_. A hundred thousand wights as far as the horizon spreads, and they could never have held them back, never, and as Jaime is pulled by the crowd into the castle he realises he's merely delaying his fate.

They're entering the stage for a massacre.

The world spins and he stumbles halfway across the courtyard to Brienne and bile hits his throat and he's throwing up on the ground a few steps before he makes it to her, pushing his head against the frozen rock to feel anything other than the certainty that they're all going to die. In the distance, he can hear the screams of men, and the creak of closing gates.

He risks a glance up to Brienne. He expected eyes frenzied from the fight, staring into the middle distance, looking for the next target. He was wrong. Instead he met her gaze, and he can see that, somewhere in the mess, she's sustained a massive cut down her face, eyebrow to chin, slicing all the way through the cheek. She looks _scared_. Blood is pouring from her face with appalling speed, and he takes that final few steps towards her, looks up at her. She looks down at him, shivering, taking in his face like it's the last thing she'll ever see. It's a terrifying thing.

They don't need to say anything. He's not even sure she can, her cheek is so slashed. He looks over to the gates and checks that they're closed, the dead and half the army behind it, bashing at the wood, begging to be let in, and he sheathes his sword just so he has a hand free to caress her hair, matted with all the worst of a corpse, and he breathes in deep and stares and she reaches out a hand and scrubs it across the back of his head, too forceful to be pleasant but in its own way comforting, warm at least.

"Open the gates!" he hears in the distance, hundreds of voices, shrill and high, and all around them, the drumbeat of a hundred thousand corpses running.

He realises that pretty little vision of bedding each other is never happening. And so's an image, scraping itself across his imagination unbidden, of him and Brienne, wearing each other's cloaks, smiling and warm in the summer sun. Perhaps a white piece of cloth joining their hands. She does like the old gods, after all.

None of that can come true, so he just does the only thing he has left to give her, in the time he has left. Hope that it tells the rest of what he's never said.

He kisses her.

Brief and chaste, nothing at all, really, but he just vomited out half his stomach and her face is coated in blood and horse shit, so he doesn't think either of them would prefer it otherwise. He closes his eyes as he does it just to make it feel romantic.

He leans back and opens his eyes. Brienne's face crumples, just a little, and he can see all that blood pouring from the effort of moving her face and he wants to curl up and die, right here, just so he never has to think about her looking so defeated again. He settles for just collapsing his head into her chest, her head resting on his shoulder, for the few moments they have left like this.

He can hear dragons. The screaming outside the walls is subsiding horribly fast.

She mumbles something, and he has to back her up and stare at her face to face.

"What?" he gasps.

Her face contorts with the effort and pain of speech.

"…Figh' 'il we're dea'.." she makes out. He feels like he ought to cry, but instead he just feels sick again. He won't tell her about Pod. Not now. If they survive, she can hate him for it.

"Fight 'til we're dead," he repeats, nods, tries to make it feel convincing. He grips her arm hard. He smiles at her just because she can't, and because she ought to see something that isn't the army of the dead. He can only hope he's been comforting.

The silence draws their attention first.

And then everyone backing away from the doors, running down from the walls, calling to _take cover, take cover, fucking run!_

Brienne grabs his arm and he grabs hers and they run for the castle with the rest as behind them—

The sound of something terrible descends—

And they look back as a dragon with black-blue flesh erupts from the sky, white-blue flame boiling in its throat, and destroys the walls of the Winterfell gates.

* * *

**The Three-Eyed Raven**

* * *

He watches from the eyes of crows that are immolated in the blue-white flames.

It had only been a matter of time, but, in truth, he had expected the Night King to wait for the walls of Winterfell to be breached.

It seems whatever drives its decisions lacks patience, which is interesting. Or perhaps it means something else for strategy. He will have to compare it later.

For now, he has to speed things along.

He returns to the cold air and shifting branch sounds of the godswood and regards the men defending him. They look scared. He supposes he heard the dragon.

"Theon," he says. Theon turns, fearful but, as expected, after all he has been through, the guilt he has, he is ready to do whatever Bran asks.

"You're a good man," Bran says. Theon exhales, eyes shining with tears. Nods.

Bran tilts his head up at the branches of the weirwood. A single leaf breaks from the branch in the cold, flutters to the ground; he watches its progress slowly. When it hits the frozen snow, it dissolves to dust.

It's time.

"And I need you to do something for me."


	2. Protecting the Innocent

**Brienne**

* * *

The Great Keep is full of people bleeding, screaming and dying. In any other fight, Brienne would have been railing against deserters: cravens that in breaking the line were risking the lives of everyone else present.

Today, in her first role as a commander of an army, she had led the whole damn army to a stampede back, almost as soon as the battle had begun.

Her face _hurts_. She hasn't dared to touch it, doesn't want to make it worse, but blood is pouring into her mouth. Enough that she's taken to just spitting it on the stone flags. It's cut all the way through her cheek, at least in one place. She's not even sure how it happened, but she knows when; trying to get to Jaime, trying to pull that thing off his head, she had felt a slice of heat from her forehead to her chin. She had just kept going, but now they're inside the Great Keep, now there's some form of temporary defense between them and the dead swarming into Winterfell, she has time to feel the pain.

The worst part is, despite the fact that they're almost certainly going to die, perhaps within the hour, the thing she can't stop thinking about is how it's going to scar. Whether Jaime will kiss her again if it twists her mouth into a snarl.

She's run like a girl from the fight. Now she can't stop thinking like one. Pathetic. Coward.

Jaime's pushed up to the staircase, up past where they can see any doors or windows, and he's sat down with his head to his knees, shivering. She can hear the Mormonts, still clean from their lack of battle, wrestling against the crowd to try and shut the doors to the Keep. She can't find it within herself to help. She sits down next to Jaime and stares into space as people run past, lie down, vomit, hide. Just beneath them, lower down on the staircase where it turns a corner, an Unsullied drags his fellow soldier into the space, sits him upright, speaks to him desperately in Low Valyrian. The soldier is only responding in laboured breaths. Sounds to her like blood in the lungs. He won't live long.

She holds her sword in both hands. Points it straight ahead of her. Studies the patterns of Valyrian steel dappling its surface, white-black-red. She's done this many times before, knows every ripple and the order of its colours, but it's never been coated in the entrails and skin and black rotten liquid of a corpse before, so it adds some variety to the image.

She would ask where Pod is, but even if he's alive there's nothing she can do to help him.

The quality of the light filtering through to them in the close-to-black corridor changes. Where once it was a flickering orange, it shifts to a sickening blue. Outside, she can hear only noise, formless.

The Night King's dragon. She only caught a glimpse before she had run for the Keep, but it had smashed through the walls like a blade through flesh. Her last glimpse of the outside, she had seen the dead streaming through the hole it had created, and she should have kept fighting. Coward, she had run, and if the Seven took her tonight, she would be going to the Seven Hells, she was sure of it.

_And if the old gods have a hell,_ she thought, _I am certainly already there._

Beneath her, the ragged breaths shallow, and then slacken, as the Unsullied soldier's body slides sideways from the wall. His compatriot shudders out a cry of anguish and holds the body close, cradling it against his chest as he sobs.

"Brienne!"

Arya. She's standing before she can feel the urge to, her sword held close and ready, looking up as Arya Stark takes the stairs down two at a time, barges past someone ascending them, stands above Brienne. She's breathing fast, her eyes are wide, but she has all the ferocity and determination behind it that Brienne currently lacks. She's staring at Brienne's face as she talks, not her eyes.

"The walls are down," Arya says. "We need to get to the crypt, _now_."

Brienne is too shocked to reply. Isn't even sure what Arya wants from her right now. _Can't she see that we're all going to die? Can't she see it's over?_

"Brienne," Arya prompts, making eye contact, all tenderness lost in a sharp, cold voice. "You swore an oath to protect Sansa. And me. Sansa's in the crypt."

Brienne doesn't say anything.

Arya tries once more, her clear bright eyes giving way to a flicker of vulnerability.

"And I'm right here."

Brienne's face is throbbing.

Arya blinks, breathes in and out, shakes her head, and then rushes past her, down the stairs.

Brienne feels Oathkeeper in her hand.

Brienne's after her before she can even take a breath or spit out all the blood in her mouth, her desperation not to see Arya's death winning over the fear of her own. Behind _her_, she can hear a movement and clatter that she knows with absolute certainty is Jaime, following behind. She glances back. His hair has stuck to his forehead. He's clenching his teeth so hard she can see his jaw straining, but his eyes seem firmly stuck on her, following without question. It hurts to smile, she's not even sure if she's doing it, but she tries, and his eyes slide from gritted fear to that strange, unguarded look he gave her before he kissed her. She doesn't like looking at that, not like this, and she has to turn away.

She's struggling to catch up as they cross the entryway to the Keep: there are so many bodies of injured and dying littering the ground, you have to pick your way across. Brienne manages to step on a few hands and swords and legs as she makes her way through, but she doesn't particularly care. Two objectives: protect Arya, protect Sansa. She's just going to lock onto those two objectives until she's dead. She can at least fulfil her knighthood in the process.

Arya looks back, from across the Keep, already at the doors of the Great Hall, and smiles grimly to see Brienne coming closer to her, flips her dragonglass spear in her hand.

"Speed up," she says. "We need to get through past the Guest House—"

The flare of blue flame washes out Brienne's vision for a moment. By the time she's stumbling back, the Great Hall is scorched, crumbling, and Viserion is inside of it.

She surges forward, sword up, and Arya wheels back from the doorway, but it's too little and too late. The jaws of the undead monster close around Arya's small body and crushes it before she can even cry out. Flings the broken body across the Hall, behind its seething bulk. Brienne screams, and _it_ turns, mouth opening, boiling blue.

A hand gripping her arm, pulling her sideways, and they're running, running as a creature from only her nightmares snatches away one of her wards, she'd promised to protect her, _she'd promised to protect her_.

She's part of a retreat again, further and further into the bowels of the castle with a crowd of increasingly desperate and exhausted people. She can hear the unholy sound as it readies itself, not far enough behind, and the corridors light up so bright, so searingly hot, she can barely see or breathe. It's not screaming she hears now, it's the guttural sound of someone's flesh sloughing off of their throat _as_ they scream. The only things keeping her from collapse are Jaime's hand on her arm and her legs propelling her forward towards the Guest House. _Sansa_. That's all she has left. _Protect Sansa._

The blood pouring into her mouth almost chokes her and she stops to cough, spit and gasp, and Jaime drags her along before she's even taken a breath.

"Come _on_," he screams, voice cracking with the force, and the anger in his voice, finally unrestrained, is so frustratingly _familiar_ that she starts overtaking him, even though her face feels like it's ripping apart, and her lungs are burning. And Arya Stark's ragdoll body, crushed in a thousand teeth, is seared behind her eyes.

They turn a corner, and find that people are rushing from a building into the open air. The Guest House is a gaping, smoking crater filled with bones, rocks and corpses, and the ceiling above them as they run for the outside is tilting alarmingly. A crack from above, a rush of air behind them. She can hear the sounds of bones breaking and air escaping lungs. They don't look back to see, they just keep running. When Jaime finally lets go of her arm to draw his sword, she feels abandoned to the chaos, has to run forward and drag Oathkeeper through a wight, less decomposed than most, perhaps an Umber, before she feels like she's _here_ again.

Above, she hears a screech, and prepares to run back for the collapsing walls of the Keep, but the dragon above her is green and it barrels through the air, lands over in the courtyard on top of two dozen wights and swings its tail around as it breathes fire. As the wights catch light and drop, Brienne takes half a step back, inhales, then rushes directly for the courtyard, past the green dragon, slams every step against the flags as fast as she can until she makes it to the crypt's eastern entryway.

The doors have been forced open.

"_Sansa_!" she screams, can feel she's torn her mouth saying it, and she's barrelling down into the darkness, sword up ready to strike, and when the first wight screeches in response and sprints for her she cuts it in half. There's a rustling sound and now there are twenty wights, perhaps more, all turning the corner and running for her at top speed, and she swings with enough force to break bone, forgets all technique and just hits until it's dead. She doesn't stop to breathe, can feel blood running down her throat and choking her, just keeps running into the thick of the crypt until she's tripping over Sansa's prone body and falling to the ground.

Jaime vaults over her to cut a wight's head off as she crawls up, takes in the sight. Men, women and children, slumped over tombs and on the ground. There are none left alive, at least none that she can see in this dank hallway. She drops Oathkeeper to the ground, kneels, takes Sansa's face in her hands.

Sansa's not dying. She's dead. Her skin is still warm but there's no intake of breath. Her brows are uncreased, she looks unstressed, her beautiful face is unmarred even by blood, but her bowels have been torn from her body and one of her legs has been broken backwards.

Brienne stares and stares and stares down at the beautiful face in her hands.

She's not crying.

When Renly died, she had lost all control, had gripped his body in her arms and wailed in the anguish and fury of having been so close and not protecting him, like she had pledged.

For some reason, as she looks down at Sansa, thinks of how she died down here in pain and in the dark, she can't find the tears. She can't find anything. She's failed Catelyn Stark and she's failed both her daughters, and all she can feel is _empty_.

Blood drips from her face onto Sansa's. She's marred her. She swipes it away with a thumb and only manages to smear it, and she rocks back onto her heels, breathing fast and harsh.

She hears something, behind her, and looks back to see Jaime crouched down as well, surrounded by the bodies of the wights he's killed, Widow's Wail flung to the side. He's clinging to a body in his arms, and she doesn't need to ask which one. He's shaking.

She sits back and doesn't look at Sansa, looks at Jaime's back instead, stares at him.

The screaming above them gets quieter, over the minutes. The candles in the crypt burn lower. Jaime slowly loses all decorum as he clutches at Tyrion's body, starts to cry audibly. Brienne can't comfort him, right now, but she keeps watching because it's easier than looking at Sansa.

For a single moment, as Jaime's sobs subside to nothing, there is blissful silence where they sit.

In the corner of her eye, she sees flat blue eyes open.

She's screaming as she stands, fumbles back for her sword and is pulled into a crowd of staring eyes. She knows half the faces, knows Varys even with his face torn open as he bites hard into her shoulder. She kicks him back but children are surging forward to take his place, and she punches into them until she has enough space to turn back and go for her sw—

_Sansa_.

Sansa's intestines slide from her body as she—_it_— drags itself over the top of Oathkeeper, grasping its arms at Brienne's legs and crunching its broken leg back and forth. Brienne has to jump over the top of it, can hear herself screaming but can't feel it in her face anymore. Looks to her right and finds Jaime backing away, sword in hand and eyes wide and wet, and he looks at her and looks back at the crowd of wights as they start to break into a run and she can see Tyrion, neck broken and tilted, starting to run—

The next few minutes are silence, to her. She can feel that she's screaming herself hoarse, yelling even though it hurts her mouth to speak, she doesn't have her _sword, _ and Jaime's pressing Widow's Wail into her hand and yelling at her but she has no fucking clue what he's saying, and they're out into the courtyard and it's swarming with the dead blue eyes of their own people, and they're running, she can feel a crowd at her back and they keep running forward, forward, forward, she swings Jaime's sword down over and over, even as hands grasp at their backs or attack from the front and try to pull one or both of them down.

They've left through the western entrance to the crypt instead, and she barely knows where she's going or why, why she doesn't just pick a place to stand her ground and die, but fear is driving her forward, the fear that if she stops, Jaime will stop, and Jaime will die without anything to defend himself, and she'll have lost everyone she ever swore to protect, and she cannot, will not, live with that.

Overhead she hears the awful painful scream of the ice dragon again but this time there are two of them, green and black-blue, chasing down the dragon Daenerys rides upon, and she can see a stream of silver hair on its back. The two dragons erupt ice blue flame and hit their mark and the great black-red dragon roars as it spirals down above them, crashes outside the walls of Winterfell. The other two spear down for the kill.

It takes Brienne a moment to realise, as she looks back down, that all the wights around her have stopped s_till_. Jaime and her stumble to a halt, exchange a hasty glance, look where they're looking. They're looking to the crushed gates of Winterfell.

The storm overhead swirls and grows colder, freezes the blood on her face, and a demon walks through the castle gates.

Clad in black, bald but for its horns spiking to the sky, blue-skinned, eyes- the eyes aren't emotionless, like the rest of the dead blue eyes of its children.

They _hate._

Wherever this creature is, it's come with several hundred of its own kind, martial and long-haired and all carrying swords of ice, that march behind it. Their legs all move in unison with their King.

The Night King walks into the courtyard of Winterfell. Brienne and Jaime are frozen in place where they stand, watching from across the destroyed castle grounds as it strides slowly. Not exactly in their direction. Not in the direction of any of the very, very few survivors that she can see dotting the battlefield.

Straight for the godswood.

"Bran," she forces out in a whisper. The look Jaime gives her, tears frozen to his face, eyes open and desperate— it's hell and hope in one lot. One last Stark child to try to defend. Fail to defend.

A scream.

Jon Snow, face bleeding, left arm broken and swinging, bastard sword in hand, charges from the Great Keep across the courtyard, barrelling straight towards the Night King and _yelling so loud the world seems to reverberate with it_, and the Night King looks up and regards Snow as he crosses the distance so fast that the Night King doesn't even have time to raise his sword, and _swings Longclaw to the Night King's neck._

The sword shatters.

Jon Snow stares at his own empty hand.

The Night King observes Jon Snow a fraction of a second more, then pushes the ice sword through his chest.


	3. The Spiral

**Jaime**

* * *

They sprint through the stone-still bodies of men and women he once fought alongside, mixed in with the haggard corpses of the army they had joined. He knocks against a few as they run, looks back to find them unmoved. Only their eyes are shifting, slowly, to follow their king, advancing slowly on the godswood as they rush to beat him there.

Jaime has no sword, no right hand, and where he should be keeping an eye on his steps, one in front of the other, he can't stop seeing Tyrion. Tyrion, his eyes opening blue in his arms. Tyrion, neck lolling, skin ice-cold in seconds. Tyrion, his _brother_, his _brother_.

He's failed to protect his family. He's failed to protect the Stark girls, in their own home. And now all the commanders of their army are dead, all dragons slain, and their Valyrian steel will do nothing to save them.

But if he's going to die tonight, he'll at least die in the field of battle, and he'll die defending Brandon Stark alongside Brienne of Tarth, and that, he's decided, will be enough.

He regrets kissing her now. It promised an _after_. He doesn't know what he would have done with an _after_, anyway. He didn't think about the reality of it at the time, just the foolish image of a wedding, a life standing together swords in hand: the look in Brienne's eyes, wild as rain. It was a nice image, and a mummer's show. He'd spent his life being a terrible man, serving terrible men, fucking his own twin sister, and for so long that Aerys' passion for wildfire had rubbed off on her. He taints people. _"What makes you think there'll be an afterwards?",_ Bran had asked him. He should have listened.

The entry to the godswood is thick with the dead. The corpses of wights are piled high amongst the new-raised sentinels, against walls, lying sideways against the stone archway. Not a speck of blood crosses the threshold. They climb over the tumbling skeletons and flesh, scrambling in their haste to beat the measured pace of the Night King not so far behind them, the silent marchers behind him, their armour dappled with moonlight and shifting like a septon's crystal, all colours and none, hair unmoving in the howling snowstorm. He can't feel his left hand for the cold anymore, has to look down at it just to make sure it's still there.

The godswood of Winterfell is a place he's only visited once, yesterday, and he likes it no better in the dark. The sentinels around them spike needles at his face when he doesn't take care to look up, and when he looks up roots trip him underfoot, and all of the ground feels so soft with a thousand years of decayed leaves, he almost doesn't notice when he steps in something wet.

He looks down. In the storm, the moonlight has been restricted to a near-pitch darkness, and he can no longer tell what it is, but he knows the feel of flesh underfoot; he's been fighting in wars all his life, he knows a fallen body. He does not have time to find out what it is, dead or undead.

What scant moonlight is left seems to have been collected just for the weirwood. Bran's silhouetted against the bone-white bark, the last Stark in Winterfell.

Dappled in the last of the light, dripping around him, is a nightmare.

Brienne rushes up beside Jaime, and she has to retch and look away. He doesn't blame her. She has a hell of a head for violence, but atrocity is a different thing to become inured to.

On the ground is what remains of a force of northerners and ironborn, staining the snow. They've been mangled almost beyond recognition. Bones hanging onto meat, jaws torn from heads, torsos cut in half again and again until they're shreds of rib and muscle. They're spread about piece by piece, swirling around the weirwood in a neatly constructed spiral. Unbroken, their entrails have been preserved with the care of a butcher, and they garland the hand-branches of the weirwood in dripping streams. Jaime thinks briefly of hands joined by white cloth beneath it and almost feels sick from the notion.

Beneath the weirwood, the shaking figure of Theon Greyjoy, hunched over in the tree's roots. Jaime, beginning to walk forward slowly across the clearing, trying to walk with feigned ease over the spiralled remains of many loyal men, realises that Theon is moaning. Blood is flowing from his mouth, and when he hears the sound of Jaime's boots in the snow he tips his head up. Jaime can see that, along with most of his face, he has scratched out his tongue and eyes. He makes a formless sound, a dripping whimper. He's covered in blood from head to foot more surely than if he had bathed in it; he's glistening.

Sitting in the center of it all, Bran, hands folded over each other where he sits. He's looking right at Jaime, and his eyes are as cold as they were before.

"The Night King is coming," Bran says, then. His voice is light and distant. "This godswood was built by the children, over four thousand years ago. It will hold him back, but not for long."

There were a thousand things he ought to say; 'I'm sorry we couldn't stop him', 'Jon Snow is dead', 'your sisters are dead', 'everyone is dead', but Jaime can only stand and whisper, words ricocheting in the dark.

"What did you do?"

Bran smiles, a pained small smile. It's the most emotion Jaime's seen from him since the start.

"Dragonglass did not kill the Night King; dragonfire did not kill the Night King; Valyrian steel did not kill the Night King. What could have been done, was done, and we will not succeed. Winterfell will belong to the dead by dawn, and the night will not end."

Jaime shivered as the storms grew louder; the wind was cutting like a knife through layer upon layer of wool and leather and steel. Vaguely, he tries to connect what he's seeing to what he knows; mad tyrants, exercising their power on people they control. Men roasting in their own armour. Wildfire, dragonfire. But there was a focus to this carnage that Jaime couldn't recognise, and no matter how much he thought of the heat of the many fires he'd been near, he only felt the dull ache of his freezing skin.

Brienne finally made her way across the viscera to join him within the spiral, shifts Widow's Wail in her hand over and over until she almost fumbles it. Bran does not seem to feel the cold; he just tilts his head up to the blooded branches of the weirwood and continues on.

"The Neck will not hold them. What is left of the God's Eye will not hold them. The Riverlands, the Westerlands, the Reach and the Crownlands; all of them will fall, one by one, until the Others reach from the shattered arm of Dorne to the lights beyond the North." His eyes shine in the dark. "And then the arm of Dorne will freeze over, and they shall march across the Narrow Sea."

"Then what is this?" Brienne says, her voice still and distant, and Jaime takes a step sideways just to press his shoulder against hers, a small comfort in the dark. It doesn't stop either of them shivering. Theon is still whimpering lowly in the shadows. Bran exhales, and watches his breath fog in the air.

"Brienne," Bran says, like he's testing the name on his tongue, "I need you to go back to the entrance. Defend us for as long as you can from the white walkers."

Jaime pushed forward and into Brienne at the same time, jostling himself against her as if it could stop her from going. The fear of it cleared his mind a little from the cold. "Absolutely not. Brienne, take Bran and try to get to the stables, if they haven't killed the horses there's a chance you can ride south before they notice you've gone. Give me the sword."

"Absolutely not," Brienne says, her voice unwavering, like he's mad to ask, like it's some petty insult he's thrown her way. "You have a chance to convince your sister to stop this before it spreads further—"

"He crippled me, you know," Bran says, his voice calm and even. Jaime exhales like he's been punched, stares at Bran as Bran looks at Brienne. "I was climbing. I caught him and his sister in the broken tower." Bran shifts his gaze, looks at Jaime. Jaime searches for any sign of fury or anger in his eyes and finds none, and it's worse than the alternative.

Bran tilts his head.

"What you did to me made me," Bran said. "When you pushed me, I became something else. And now, I am going to make you something else. Brienne, go to the entrance. Defend us for as long as you can. For the oath you owe my sisters."

Behind him, Theon has stopped moaning. He's crumpled up on the roots, chest barely moving in and out, rattling with each breath.

Jaime risks looking up to Brienne's face, and finds everything he's ever feared.

Her face, still cut up, torn in every direction, blood frozen to it, has become still when it looks at him. Not the crumpled-up sadness he'd tried to kiss away, not the frantic blazing eyes of battle, not even the cool satisfaction she'd once looked at him with, an eternity ago, whenever she kicked him to the ground after he'd made some awful comment or another.

He'd never seen her look at him like he was a stranger before. Like he wasn't Jaime Lannister.

He supposes she'd never known who Jaime Lannister was until now.

And when he steps forward to say goodbye, say anything, try to grab for her sword and die protecting her instead, like the coward he is, she turns on her heel and steps through the blood and meat and snow and is gone, Widow's Wail the last thing he can make out as it glints in the darkness before disappearing in the trees.

Theon's breathing is slowing, the rattle less frequent than before.

"We need to help him," Jaime murmurs, distantly.

"He'll be dead in a few minutes," Bran says. "His lungs are filling with blood."

"Ah."

Bran shifts his hands in his lap. Something in them glitters.

"Kneel down in front of me, Jaime."

His legs don't want to move. Bran's eyes flicker, for the first time, with an emotion.

"Don't let her sacrifice go to waste."

His breathing is coming faster, he takes a step and another and kneels but he can barely breathe, his chest is heaving and his hand and face is numb and Bran, the arbiter of his sins, looks down on him carefully.

"What I'm about to do," Bran says, "has been attempted before. I might not succeed this time. But if you do what I say, we might be able to undo all that has happened tonight."

"We can't- undo- anything," Jaime says, picking over the words between breaths.

"I can promise you," Bran says, sounding for the world _impatient_, "If you do exactly as I say, we can save Brienne. And Cersei. And many, many others. I need you to trust me when I say I'm telling the truth"

Jaime tilts his head down, rocks backwards and forwards a little where he kneels. He has no sword. Death is coming for him, but not before it comes for Brienne, who's going to die defending him and do it knowing it was for a man who does not deserve it, and he's at the mercy of whatever Bran wants to do with him, but—

But—

Bran knows more about whatever this new awful world is, far better than he does. If there's a chance that through this awful blood magic Bran can save everyone, he has to let him try.

And if Bran's just turned mad since he pushed him from the tower, well; it's not the first one he's let torture people.

Bran lifts a glittering object in his hands and for the first time he can see that it's an arrow, tipped with dragonglass.

"No matter what," Bran says, placing one hand on Jaime's shoulder, "do not move."

Jaime shivers as Bran levels the arrow, presses the tip into the boiled leather under his gorget, just beneath his hammering heart.

And then pushes it _in_.

The sharp sensation of pain as it pierces leather and makes its way into his skin, pushes further. The sensation of something being very _wrong_, the same feeling as when he'd seen his hand separate from his wrist, seen a dead man run for him. The only thing that keeps him from jolting back is Bran's hand on his shoulder, pushing him into the arrow, and some stubborn part of him holding onto the empty promise of saving lives.

In the distance, he can hear steel sing. He tries to turn around, but he can't seem to find the energy. It's flowing from his chest, sticking against Bran's fingers, shining black in the last of the light.

Bran pushes the arrow, again, in, and up, and Jaime can see the blood making Bran's fingers slide as he tries and fails to push it in further. Distantly, Jaime can hear himself screaming. Or perhaps it's Brienne. Hard to tell. He's cold, and he wants to sleep.

Bran tries to push the arrow up further, but his fingers are wet against wet wood. He moves his hand down, grips from the nock, and pushes in again, this time making progress. Jaime feels something tear in his chest, and he feels something release, and his chest is gushing, staining the snow.

He hears a crash, and a sound like shattering steel. A voice screams his name, and he can barely turn around and Bran told him not to but _he has to_, he knows that voice better than he knows his own, all its variants but he's never heard that one before, and as the arrow pierces all the way through his heart _he wrenches his head back and sees her eyes_—

And then he's in the snow. Sliding. Drop by drop of him, he flows, up and up against bone-white bark, into a face staring at him with ruby eyes.

_Into a churning, gory heart, and something that sees him._

**Hello, Lannister.**


	4. Mirre Jēda Morghūlilza

**Jaime**

* * *

_The air presses, wet and heavy and close. He does not remember when he came to be standing in a field, or what manner of field it could possibly be. Towering above him, taller than a man on horseback, great stalks of grass, wider than his hand and sharper than steel. They glow a sickly green. There is no wind to blow them and so they stand straight up. The sky is darker than ink. There are no stars. The only light comes from the grass, with its milk green glow, creating a shine on his sweating skin. He is naked but for his golden hand. He looks down at it and the gold wilts from the steel beneath, flaking to the dry soil. He bends down to pick it up but every fragment he touches melts, absorbed by the ground._

**You broke the world, Lannister.**

_The grass in front of him bends like the sea parting in half. A long, thin path, leading to a light that isn't green, and he follows it. As he walks, the air presses closer, sticking to his skin. Every breath feels so wet it's like he's drowning. The dry soil grows damp, and he looks down to see that, flickering with the light of a fire, is blood. It's warm and familiar._

_He looks up to find himself surrounded by a walled circle of glowing grass, and an empty clearing of the blood, pooling outwards in glittering spirals. Its light does not reflect on the grass._

_Standing in the centre of the blood's glowing firelight is Euron Greyjoy. He does not smile with a manic frenzy, like the Euron he had briefly known. He is solemn, and his hands are wet with blood that does not glow, and he looks down from the starless sky to regard him._

_His left eye is as it ever was, a pale slate blue, but his right eye is flooded with red._

**Did you stop to think that someone other than your Winterfell army could have killed them?**

_Euron's lips are moving but the sound of his voice is all wrong; it comes from all places, is spoken with a hundred thousand voices, and grinds like steel on steel. He quails from the sound, and Euron does not smile as he laughs._

**I suppose not, Kingslayer. You never looked further than what you saw in front of you.**

_Euron looks back up at the sky._

**What you have done is done. Everything I have worked for these last eight years— you are about to kill it all. And I shall have to start again.**

_His hands are dripping, dripping, dripping, and with every drop that hits the pool, its comforting light dims._

**But some information is too precious to hope that I happen across it twice. **

_He turns and smiles, his blood eye glowing along with the light, and the smile is familiar and sickening. Euron turns his gaze upon the blood, and he follows the view down. There is a body lying in the blood, small and crumpled. He would know her name if he forgot his own. His other half, part of his whole, gushes blood into the pool, glowing with life, from the cut that slices in her in half from neck to hips. A second cut tears across her curved belly, her silvered stripes of childbearing almost swallowed by the light, and from it a glow so bright it makes his head hurt._

**It was hard to stop the world long enough to speak to you, **_Euron says._ **The greenseer did not want it, but fuck the greenseer. I had your blood, and enough glass candles to project it clear of his fucking eyes.**

_He tries to take a step, toward her, but the blood traps his legs and all he can do is drop to his knees. Euron walks with ease through the pool, and the blood ripples across Cersei's face and she is gone, dissolved into silence, and Euron crouches down and takes his head in hands warm with blood._

**Listen to me, Kingslayer, listen now. You need to remember this, because I won't know it even if you seek me out and ask me to repeat it back. Are you listening?**

_He moves his mouth. He's not sure if he's speaking; Euron's voice is so loud it's deafened him. _

**Good. To go north, you must journey south- to reach the west you must go east. To go forward you must go back, and to touch the light you must pass beneath the shadow.**

_The world turns dark as he speaks. The blood's light is fading fast, and Euron grips his head harder._

**And if by chance you don't break it all again, Kingslayer,** _Euron says, tears flowing from his blood eye,_ **come find me and tell me what the fuck it all means.**

_The blood turns black and the world flickers green and Euron's blood-warm hands are gone. _

_The wind blows, the grass shivers with a thousand songs._

_The green fades to black, and the wind blows cold. _

**Good luck, Jaime.**

* * *

He wakes.


	5. A Summer Morning

**Jaime**

* * *

The air Jaime gasped in was light and clear, braced with the cool edge of the morning. He took it in again, and again, to replace the burning he felt in his lungs. His throat felt tight and close, his eyes felt raw and wet.

The daylight was thin, only just breaking through the strands of the tent. Between each thread of canvas, the light was painted with the crimson of the dye. He frowned up at it. His watering eyes blurred the image, and so he wiped at them, first with his left hand and then with his right stump.

Jaime smashed himself in the nose with a stump that began far sooner than he thought, and that had far too many fingers.

He sat upright. Stared down. Flexed first the left hand and then its twin, balled them again and again into fists. No pain from phantom fingers, no unyielding gilded metal. Just strong, whole flesh, moving at command. Shaking, he guided his left hand to touch the right, let it skim with care across the skin on his palms that felt every whisper of touch, rubbed across the familiar swordsman's calluses between thumb and forefinger. He dug his nails into the pad of a finger just to feel the pain.

With the furs pushed down where he sat, he could feel the morning air on his chest. He brushed his right hand down, still moving the fingers strangely just to watch them dance. He rubs across the place he remembers an arrow piercing, digging into his heart until it bled out into the weirwood. There was only unbroken skin, scattered with hair that shifted in the breeze. The day felt pleasant, and that fact alone was as unsettling as his survival. Jaime looked up and around.

The tent was a deep red canvas, the flaps trimmed with golden fringe and breathing in the air. The interior was more luxuriant than Jaime had preferred or received in years. A stand for his gold-and-white Kingsguard armour, polished to a shine, the white cape unblemished. A great trunk, carved from oak, upon which a peeling golden lion had been gilded rampant. Inside it, he could see the evidence of where someone had carelessly flung the clothes of the night before, and all of them were finely made. Shirts of fine linen, cloaks of black satin, tunics embroidered with gold thread. Half of the clothes were embroidered with gold thread, now he looked properly: the only exception he could see was a jacket, crumpled on gold-carpeted grass, lying by the fine feather-down mattress covered in shadowskin and furs. He reached out again with his right, picked it up, felt the ease with which his right arm bore weight. It was a jacket he'd parted with a few years ago, when the blood had finally become too tough to clean from its surface. Oiled, battered leather, light beige, lined with a red so dark it was almost brown. A collar that wrapped around the throat on one side, lying open with the red lining face-up on the other. He had stained the right arm with the blood of a Northman, if he remembered rightly: when he had fought Eddard Stark in the streets of King's Landing. The jacket he held was clean and unstained, as whole as his right hand.

His breath came in short, shallow gasps.

The air was that of a cool summer morning.

He dressed quickly with two hands. Didn't look too closely at what he picked up, just pulled it on, threw the coat jacket over the top and clasped it at the waist.

The sword he found by the other side of the bed was not smoked with grey and red, not the familiar Valyrian weight of Widow's Wail; it was a clear, smooth steel, the filigree at the guard that of the Kingsguard, the pommel that of a lion. He picked it up with his left hand, belted it to his right hip, and sped out into the morning.

The grass was pale, the fields rocky and heathered. The camp was large— buzzing with servants attending to campfires and chamberpots and fine destriers— but too small to be that of any war he'd ever fought. He looked up, and above a grand tent, almost a palisade, he could see the crowned stag of Baratheon on a limp golden banner, fluttering a little against the slate grey sky.

He drew in a breath.

It was the Northern stretch of the Kingsroad. It was 298, and it was the day that Robert Baratheon had completed his procession to Winterfell. It was the day before, six years previous, he had pushed Bran Stark out of a window.

The light breeze rustled Jaime's hair in front of his eyes, and he brushed it back, feeling its length, noting how it glinted in the low light of the morning like beaten gold. His hair hadn't been this blonde in years.

_Hadn't it?_

He looked out to the camp lying innocently before him. He stood in a clear day, in late summer, six years before anything he remembered. It was cold, still— light snows peppered the tops of tents and hills— but he remembers a bitter chill that froze tears to his face and gold to his arm, a cold that only wights could abide. So far as he could see, there were no wights in this North: just squires and woodsmoke and fine clothing and a right hand. He still felt as on edge, scanned the treeline beyond the camp for untoward movement. A squire walked past and startled at seeing him.

"G'morning, ser," the squire mumbled, nodding his head in a hasty bow. Jaime nodded at him, as unsettled as the squire.

In his own mind, as he looked out upon the camp, he could remember this day as if it was years in his past. Could remember details of the entry to Winterfell— _"you've gotten fat_"—, could remember the feast, how his sister had grimaced at it, how his brother had missed half of it for some whore.

How Jaime had tried to kill a boy the next day to hide what he knew.

Could remember six years of lies and wars and torture, Ned Stark's beheading, his capture at Robb Stark's hands, release at Catelyn's, the long march home, _Brienne_, his hand, the Sept of Baelor, Joffrey, Myrcella, Tommen, all dead, _a dead man, a hundred thousand dead men with blue eyes that shone as dead as Tyrion's had when he had stirred in the Winterfell crypt, a crippled man slowly, slowly pushing a dragonglass arrow into his heart as he had looked back to her eyes_—

Something brushed against his shoulder.

He slammed his elbow back, had his sword almost pulled from the scabbard before he saw his assailant was a servant that hadn't been looking where she was going, doubling over and coughing. He sheathed the sword again and stepped back, reeling.

"Begging pardon, ser," the servant choked out, her eyes locked on the sword he'd almost drawn. Jaime raised his right hand to her nervously, went to put it down as she flinched. Raised it again and waved her off, and she rushed from his sight.

The scent of woodsmoke turned his stomach.

He strode back into his tent and sat down hard on the ground. He screwed his eyes up tight, held his right hand in his left. His stomach was flipping uncomfortably; perhaps he _had_ drunk too much last night. Perhaps that was it.

_It had been a dream,_ he thought to himself. _You tried to drink too much, you were carried to your tent, and then you dreamed some awful dream about all the things a man could fear. Wildfire blowing up the city is nothing new. Losing my right hand is a new one, but not past reason to dream. A knight needs his sword hand, after all. And dreaming of Northern fears as I go north is perhaps only natural. Winter is coming, the Starks say, and so do their stories of grumpkins and snarks._

But he _knew_ that was wrong. Not in some part of him that felt unsure about it, either. He knew it like a fact of life that he had lived six years of life beyond this day, that the world had come screaming down around him, and that the boy he had crippled had played some blood magic spell to— what? Bring him back to his own body, when he was whole?

Try to prevent what had come to pass?

He tried once more to rationalise it, but memories do not feel like dreams. Both are fragmented, shift when you try to observe them, but a memory settles in your bones, sticks there and blares with guilt. A dream does not make you feel guilt, and it scatters where you chase it.

And memories change a man. He felt different to any Jaime Lannister that had walked this tent before, travelled north before. He could barely recall what had happened the night before this, and he didn't think it was alcohol because he remembered only flashes of the whole trip North, because it had been a journey he'd taken _six years ago. _He remembered uneventful travels, punctuated with uninteresting feasts he had been obliged to don Lannister cloaks for instead of the white, and wherever Cersei and he had found the time, often in the midst of the King's endless thrice-damned hunts, they had fucked somewhere no man would look. He remembered coming inside her in the melted and abandoned sept of Harrenhal. He had wondered idly, if it took, if Cersei would consider naming the child something Harren-related. Balerion Baratheon had a fine ring to it. He hadn't asked her in the end. She had been in a foul mood the whole journey, too focused on the problem of Jon Arryn.

Something stirred in his mind, an image that _did_ feel more dream than memory. Cersei crumpled on the ground, glowing with life and blood. Euron Greyjoy with one red eye, gripping him and telling him to _remember_-

_To go north, you must journey south- to reach the west you must go east. To go forward you must go back, and to touch the light you must pass beneath the shadow._

It was seared into his head like an oath. The rest of the image scattered as he tried to cling onto it, but the words had stuck.

He scratches his nails down across his scalp, pulls his hair back and balls his fists tight. His hair was long and his hands were whole, and either Bran _had_ turned the world back, and all the things that would scare a man in dreaming were true, or—

Or something worse had happened. He had taken on whatever madness drives men to think magic and white walkers and the world turning backwards could be true.

_After all, wights did die in flame,_ his mind supplied. _Burn them all, Aerys had chanted. Perhaps he too saw a future of cold blue eyes._

He shuddered where he sat. His stomach flipped again.

He sat there quietly until the sun gleamed gold through the tent, and then, stumbling over every motion of his right hand, he began to dress himself in the Kingsguard armour.

* * *

Whenever King Robert's great black warhorse snorted, its breath came in a mist. Jaime had taken to watching it instead after Baratheon had noticed him staring at him, and then staring again an hour after.

"I won't get any prettier however long you look, Kingslayer," he had said. For Robert, this was akin to a friendly regard, but Jaime hadn't been willing to push his luck with replying. The King had flipped between enthused and antagonistic twice already today, and Jaime had struggled to remember he had once been used to it.

The riding was smooth enough, but the summer snows had softened the ground of the Kingsroad enough to make the Queen's wheelhouse unsteady, and the vanguard had been forced to slow to match the pace. Robert had cursed the snows for delaying them; Jaime hadn't been particularly surprised.

He had made sure of turning up late enough that Cersei and the children had already entered the wheelhouse— and considering how late she typically was, it had earned him a black look from his sworn brothers. Boros and Meryn had accompanied Robert to Winterfell, and the two of them had been staring at him as much as he'd been staring at Robert. Jaime was well used to ignoring men that would regard him behind his back, but Meryn had been murdered a few years ago in Braavos, and Jaime, in his own mind, could not look at him without seeing a dead man riding.

Not that he had minded Meryn's death. The man had been cruel, a bully always quick to enjoy the orders Joffrey had handed down.

Joffrey was only just behind the King's progress, bored and alive, riding besides the Hound. Jaime hadn't been able to avoid looking at him, and every time he did, he expected to see a bloated, red face, blood trickling from the nose, hands clawing at his throat. He would hold his jaw closed to keep from grimacing. He wasn't sure if he'd be able to school his features when he saw Tommen and Myrcella.

The gods alone knew what he'd do when he saw Cersei. The images of a green-lit Sept and the flicker of glowing blood were chasing each other inside his mind. Or Tyrion; he had ridden ahead to avoid the progress, find some northern whore in Wintertown, if Jaime remembered rightly, and he wasn't sure how he'd face his brother and avoid the tears that had frozen to his face in the crypt, the way Tyrion's neck had made a scraping sound when he cradled his body in his arms. The way the searing blue eyes had looked at him when he stirred.

And his stomach hadn't stopped roiling. The riding was smooth, but something about every step of his horse set his nerves on edge, made his face pale, in a way he'd never felt before. He couldn't help but look for the undead behind every tree and hill. He'd hidden a jolt for his sword at least twice. His head was starting to ache.

As the progress went on through the cover of snow-white forest, less than an hour from Winterfell, Meryn muttered something to Boros and rode to Jaime's side of the King's vanguard.

"Ser Jaime," he said.

"Ser Meryn," he replied, jaw tight, trying to keep his voice level.

"Ser Boros and myself were wondering if you slept well."

Meryn had never once wondered if he had slept well, in the past or in the present. Jaime frowned. Had they heard something, seen something? He still had an image of the servant's fearful eyes in his mind as she had flinched back.

"Quite well."

Meryn's face twitched and Jaime sensed a punchline was coming.

"Only, you seem to have forgotten which hand you fight with, ser."

Jaime could feel eyes turning to the conversation, and he didn't need to look down to his waist to know that Trant was speaking true. He'd belted his sword as he had for the last three years— to his right side, for ease of drawing with his left. It had taken a long time to get out of the habit of belting his sword to his left side, and it seemed it would take some more to get back into it. Behind him, he could hear a throaty laugh— the Hound's, for sure. He could hear Robert was starting to snort.

"Gods, give me a Kingsguard with a brain," Robert said. Jaime felt ill, but he forced an easy smile.

"I've been practicing with my left," he replied evenly, and then jolted a little as his horse mis-stepped, his stomach turned: bile hit his throat and tasted strange, and he set his jaw, swallowed, kept talking just to keep himself level. "Gives me more of a challenge."

"You can fight with your left, then?" Robert questions. Jaime shifted his shoulder, and noticed that he'd had his right arm tucked in against his body. It was a pose he'd gotten used to when he wanted to rest the golden hand against his lap— he'd been riding with his left hand on the reins only, all day.

"As well as I ride with it," Jaime tried, and all eyes drop to his one-handed riding; he dropped his right arm from its wounded pose, placed it with feigned indifference against the saddle, and rode on. Robert didn't say anything, which was as good as a compliment, or at least indifference. Meryn switched back to his side. Behind him, he heard a horse stumble, and glanced back to see Joffrey sliding in his saddle as he attempted to pull his horse's neck around a corner with only one hand.

Jaime turned back before Joffrey could look up and make eye contact. He truly didn't feel well, and he was starting to think it was more than just unease. The next furrow his horse hit almost made him retch, his head swimming, and he made some fool excuse and rode off the road before anyone could bother to question it. He rode far enough into the woods that the procession wouldn't see him, and then dropped off the horse, ripped off his helmet and doubled over.

He's no maester, but vomit usually isn't crimson red.

He coughed in shock, rocked back on his heels and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, staring at the red that stained the snow. The colour made him think blood, but the feel of it… it was all wrong. It had stuck the hairs on his hand down sideways, dripping viscous and thick as syrup.

Where it cooled against the snow, it crystallised to a hard, clear red. And even in the grey light of the day, it shone like a ruby.


	6. Godswood

**Jaime**

* * *

The first thing he saw of Winterfell was Bran.

Initially, he wasn't certain of what he'd seen. The castle had only just become visible as they crested a hill, and it was only a flicker of movement he'd caught, high up on the walls. But after a moment he saw it again, a flash of dark hair between the crenulations, and he didn't need a third look to know.

He added his right hand to the reins, just to feel steady atop the palfrey. As they had come close, the bannermen had taken the lead, a row of stags and a row of lions, and he was taking up lead guard, just as he had done many years before. He'd put his helmet back on, but it hadn't hidden his discomfort when he'd returned to the procession. It felt as familiar as a blade in the heart to have Robert-fucking-Baratheon, First of his Name, making some fucking joke about Lannisters going away to shit so they can keep the gold to themselves.

Robert Baratheon, gods. There was a time he'd rejoiced to hear of the fat cunt's death. But the fifteen years he'd spent in Robert's Kingsguard, however much he'd been humiliated, had been at least peaceable. A few months of battle against the Greyjoys, no more. The years following his death had been short and brutal, and he'd lost all that he'd loved in the midst of them.

He shook himself a little. He wasn't remembering a _damn_ thing. He was sick, and a sick man is prone to all manner of insanities. _Eyes open, mouth shut, Kingslayer. A knight of the Kingsguard is expected to be unshakeable. A Lannister is expected to be unquestionable. And they're not expected to remember a false future of dead men walking, because that's what madmen think._

He'd belted his sword to the correct side. It felt wrong every time it bumped against his hip.

He was telling himself he'd never been to Winterfell before, but_ he knew every inch of the damned place._ The light summer snows were a far cry from the drifts that had almost consumed the walls, but over there, that field; he'd watched ten thousand Dothraki ride into that treeline, ten thousand flaming arakhs guttering into darkness. Over there, the eastern flank, where an endless sea of corpses had collided with him on the front line. The closer they got, the more he felt like a ghost in his own skin. The banners of Stark hung on the walls. The streets and buildings of Wintertown were scattered with smallfolk cheering the king. The world felt calm, and his skin crawled with it.

The castle gates lay open and waiting. He passed the threshold, smile carefully held in place as he rode.

And of all the things to come into his mind when his eyes locked with Ned Stark, he realised that—

—_Right there, right where Ned stood, almost to the spot—_

—Was where he had kissed Brienne.

Ned Stark's long-dead grey eyes bored into him. He inclined his head, glad for the helmet covering most of his face, rode to the side as fast as he could, hoped his haste counted either as Lannister indifference or a Kingsguard making way for his King, but either way he had been forgotten and so he could dismount, remove the helmet, try to carry himself like he was supposed to, and not look at the Starks, not look at that spot of ground.

He gripped his sword hard. He didn't remember a kiss. He was _sick_. He would find some maester in an hour or so, take whatever they gave him, and he would stop remembering something that had never happened.

Around him, the world moved as if it was a drill by a master at arms, a footwork everyone knew that he had to stumble to keep up with. Robert Baratheon, a ghost embracing ghosts. Ned Stark, tawny hair pulled back, a rare smile of genuine regard. Catelyn, her ever-piercing gaze, as ready for a war as the day he had last seen her alive. "You've got fat", says Robert, they laugh, they embrace, and Robert greets Catelyn with an ebullient "Cat", and he remembers it all.

He remembers all three dying so the Lannisters could prosper.

He kept his eyes off the Stark children. He couldn't quite bear to see them unbroken and alive, regardless of it only being sickness driving his confusion. Even in his periphery, however, he could see that all of them stood, including a young boy with shaggy hair. He didn't need to see him properly to know who it was.

While he could, with difficulty, avoid the Stark children, he couldn't avoid the sight of his own. Myrcella and Tommen stepped out of the wheelhouse, a parade of corpses, their eyes shining and bright where there had once been painted stone.

His heart tore in two. They were so _young_.

He wanted to cross the courtyard and gather them in his arms. He wanted to pick them up and bundle them on a horse and spirit them away, his _children_. _His_ children that he'd failed, over and over and over, left them at the mercy of the court and at the mercy of his sister until the ravening fuckers tore them apart.

She crossed in front of his view of them. His head turned with her movement.

Her hair was long and curled again, drifting in the cool air as she walked. She'd gathered her skirts up around her in distaste for the ground, a smile cold on her lips as she permitted Ned Stark to kiss her bejewelled hand.

By the time he tore his eyes from her, Tommen and Myrcella were gone. Taken inside, no doubt. He stared at the spot they had been.

"Take me to your crypt," Robert said. The word 'crypt' shook Jaime back to paying attention. Robert looked severe. "I want to pay my respects."

He couldn't see Cersei's face from where he stood, but he knew her expression of infuriation better than most, could picture the thin line of her lips and the downturn of her eyebrows. "We've been riding for a month, my love," she said. The tone is anything but loving. "Surely the dead can wait."

_For a couple of years,_ Jaime thought, before clenching his gloved right hand tight around his sword. _Gods, stop thinking._

"Ned," Robert prompts, and leaves.

Stark assessed Cersei, probably to tell if Tywin Lannister's daughter would punish him for the slight, and judged her wanting. He followed Robert out of the courtyard, to the western entrance of the crypt.

He wanted to scream after them. _Don't go in, you fools. Only dead men leave_.

Arya Stark's voice was higher and younger, but as determined as before, and far too loud for the company.

"Where's the _Imp_?"

Sansa Stark's voice was a far cry from what he remembered, all silk and no steel, but she too rose her voice louder than she ought.

"Will you _shut_ up?"

Cersei pretended not to notice, but she swirled her skirts around, neatly avoiding the mud, and-

_Oh. Oh, no._

He couldn't avoid her gaze when she was walking right for him, and he had to stare right into her eyes as she spoke. He wondered if she could tell. Tell _what_, he wasn't sure, but she'd been able to read his face all his life and he was sure something was clear in the set of his jaw, his eyes, whatever it was she used to figure it out.

But if she did, she gave no indication. Her eyes flickered with irritation, not with insight.

"Where is our brother?" It wasn't a question she wanted an answer to. "Go and find the little beast."

His right hand clenched tighter around the hilt of his sword. He nodded stiffly,and walked from her sight without a word. In the periphery of his vision as he turned, her face shifted a little from distaste to confusion.

He walked slowly, relaxed his gait. _The lion walks without hurry, it's the prey that have to run_. He walked past the stable, regarded the stableboy with enough arch suspicion that the boy rushed back in.

He could hear the sounds of a whore through a window. A man's laughter, too fucking familiar to stand. He walked right past even though it clenched at his heart. He walked past the guest house, past the bell tower, paced the whole way around the walls of the castle, careful and sedate.

The earth of the godswood swallowed his steps. Even in the day, it was a dark place, and he had to watch his step across the thick tangle of roots. Above, he could hear the call of a crow; he looked up, but the leaves of the trees tangled together in a net. The meagre light it let through wasn't enough to discern any kind of bird in the treeline.

The heart tree of Winterfell loomed over him, trunk bone-white, leaves blood-red. The pool of water beneath it was great and black and still. The face carved in the trunk wept to see him.

It was as isolated a place as he'd get in Winterfell.

He sat heavily against a stone, let the cool and the damp seep into him like a lifeline. He pulled off his gloves, the left first, with his teeth, and then, hastily, pulled off the right glove with his hand. He let his palms rest against the rough texture. Looked slowly around the godswood, listening for movement, jaw tight.

Silent. Not even the crow called.

He clenched both hands against his head and gasped in air. His eyes were burning, but there were no tears. His stomach had stopped turning, but his heart felt like it was trying to escape his chest.

_What was happening?_ He was losing his mind, that much was certain, but the ruby-red crystalline liquid he had coughed up, that had been real, and probably a sign of whatever sickness ailed him. It had seemed _familiar_.

Where he sat, looking down, his reflection in the great black pool of water stared back at him. His face was young and clean-shaven. His hair parted down the middle, and he knew from what he could see of it that it was a light gold, but in the water, his hair was painted grey, his eyes pale.

Ripples marred the surface. A single leaf had hit the water, red leaf spread like a bloody hand.

He frowned up at the weirwood. The carved eyes were downcast, bleeding sap.

He hadn't spent a lot of time looking at weirwoods. There had been a heart tree in the Stone Garden of Casterly Rock, a small gnarled thing. Its root system reached down into the caves, all the to the sea. If you explored the many caves, as Jaime had in his youth, you would come across the roots like white worms in the darkness. For the length of the roots, however, the trunk was a stunted thing that bent low in the godswood, leaves brushing the tops of heads.

He had played at knights with Cersei in those gardens, small tourney swords clacking under the chalk-white branches, but after Mother's death there had been no playing. Of the heart tree in King's Landing, there was only a stump, cut down thousands of years ago and petrified.

He had never looked long enough at a weirwood to realise that their sap crystallised to a clear red, bright as a ruby.

The leaves of the godswood rustled with a cold breeze. His shaking breath came out in a fine mist. He raised his shivering right hand, brushed his fingers against the sap,

and

**he is somewhere that is not the Winterfell godswood**.

**He is behind the eyes of a hundred hundred weirwoods, their eyes crusted with sap. He is soaring in a hundred thousand birds and he can feel ice clawing at their feathers. He is in the roots, buried deep in the soil, and he can feel the worms around him, wet and cold. He is in Jaime, and he can feel the frozen tears on his face, the cold metal around his handless wrist, the blood flowing from him. He is in Bran, and he can feel the sensation of having a body stop at the waist, the world flowing through his head, the blood flowing down his wrist. **

Hello, old friend, **say the birds. **

**He can't speak. His mouth is made of weirwood, and he is in too many years at once. He can taste blood, and it's not his. He'd scream if he could. The birds chitter.**

Calm down, **they say. **You need to focus on one point in time. Think of a moment.

**The choice is instinctual and bone-deep. He is at Casterly Rock, and he is eight years old, and he is looking down to the sea, churning so, so far below. The sun glows gold against the sand-brown Rock, sparkles on the waters. His toes are prickled by summer-scorched grass. Cersei is lying down on the ground, head peering over the edge of the cliff, her golden hair tangled and blowing.**

"You can't,"** she says. **"It's too far down."

"I can too,"** he says. **"I've jumped it a hundred times."

"Liar,"** she says, and she's right, but he knows he can do it. He's sure of it. It's not so far down, really, if you're brave. **

"I'll prove it!"

**He takes a step back, getting ready for a run-up.**

"No!"** Cersei screams, getting to her feet and grabbing onto him. **"I'll tell Father!"

**She has to let go of his arm when he starts running. The edge comes up too soon but he has to keep going or he'll hit the rocks below, and so he jumps.**

**The golden sun and deep blue oceans mix, in the memory, a swirling miasma of light and sea, and he lets the salt wind whistle back his hair as he drops, drops—**

**He doesn't hit the water. He is left in the swirl of gold and blue, falling forever. A raven dives with him. It has an eye in its forehead.**

Do you think you can speak now? **Bran says.**

Yes, **he says, the salt air blowing his words away as soon as they're spoken**. Where am I?

**The raven spirals a little as it falls.** Your body is in the Winterfell godswood. You are elsewhere. This is what they speak of when they speak of greensight.

Bran? **He asks.**

Mostly.

What's happening to me?

You've guessed at the most of it, although you fear you've lost your mind. I promise you, you have not. I've sent you back, Jaime. I'm still in Winterfell, eight years from now, but I've pushed you back as far as I can. I'm hoping that this time, with the knowledge I have gained, we can find out how to kill the Night King. Perhaps, if we can manage, protect the lives of those we failed to defend.

**Here, where the sky met the sun, it was hard to argue, but deep in him he felt a tug of confusion.**

But— why me?

Who else would I have chosen?

Brienne.

She had to hold back the Night King at the godswood. You could not have protected us for as long.

**The world flickers, just for a moment. The shimmering sun gives way to a moonless night, heat gives way to cold. He sees her eyes as he looks back, as Bran pierces his chest with the arrow. And then the heat is back and once more he is falling, but his chest echoes with the pain.**

You loved her.

**It feels too trite a phrase to repeat back. Brienne burns brighter than the sun. He doesn't love the sun, he just can't live without it.**

**It's easy to say nothing, here in the sky, so he stays quiet, lets the whistling of air fill the silence. The raven tilts its head, and regards him with all three eyes.**

Once, **the raven says**, I was told that no matter how we try to change the past, the result remains the same. I think this was a lie. We shall test this tonight. I want you to meet with Mance Rayder.

**He knows the name, but it takes a moment to place.**

The wildling king?

Three days before this day, the King Beyond the Wall travelled to the North, so he could observe King Robert. He has entered Winterfell as a bard known as Abel. He will play tonight at the feast. You will warn him about the white walkers, tell him what you know, and instruct him to gather his people in readiness for a journey south.

**He frowns at the raven.**

You want me to tell the king of the wildlings to invade Westeros?

In time, and if this works, you shall return north to escort the wildlings safely south of the Wall, in exchange for their aid in defending the realm when the Others attack. In this way, we will gain a hundred thousand for our side, and deprive a hundred thousand from theirs.

**He feels like he ought to argue. If there's one thing he's learned about the world, it's that expressing discontent will dredge up something in your favour, even if the person found you hateful for it. But nothing about this request makes him want to argue. Besides, the air is warm and gentle.**

**A question does come to him, however; he remembers the glint of ruby-red sap.**

Bran?

Yes?

This morning, on the way here, I-

**The calm he had felt twists into something akin to worry; it takes him a long moment to realise why. The blue of the air has turned to a slate grey. The sensation of falling feels like it's sped up. His hair whips around his face as he drops.**

Yes, **says the raven**. I'm afraid it was the cost of bringing you back. Your blood is important to the spell and so I had to find something else to replace it with.

**He chills.** You had to replace-

Go now, Jaime. We will speak when you have finished.

**The raven pulls up from its dive and flies on, and he falls further and faster, down past the walls of the broken tower and feels the shattering of his back—**

—and—

Jaime fell to the ground, hand pulled back from the weirwood.


	7. Summerwine

**Sansa**

* * *

Sansa was spending the slowest hour of her life.

Ordinarily before a feast like this, she and her friend Jeyne would sit together and excitedly discuss who was to come and what they would dress like; who would fall over drunk and who their fathers would look at disapprovingly. The last time Winterfell had hosted the lords of the North, Roose Bolton had brought his bastard son and some ill-smelling servant, and for the very first time, Father had placed Jon Snow at the back of the tables rather than the front, seemingly so that Ramsay Snow would not be seated among the heirs to Winterfell. Jon had been sullen, or moreso than usual, for weeks after, and Theon had mocked him until Robb had hit his hand so hard with a tourney sword he had broken a bone. That had brought Father's ire down on them all, and Jon had never been seated at the back tables again. Sansa cared for her bastard brother, but she'd thought it hadn't been that hard a thing to sit at the back rather than the front.

Tonight, however, was no ordinary feast. It was a _royal_ feast, so Jon wasn't even allowed in the hall, and Jeyne Poole, as the daughter of Winterfell's steward, had to help her father with the preparations. Sansa, in the meantime, had to wait until it was time for her to be led in with the lords and ladies of the houses of Stark, Baratheon and Lannister. She was to draw the crown prince.

Sansa paced the flagstones. The _crown prince_. Joffrey had ridden into Winterfell on his own horse, not with the other children in the wheelhouse. He didn't look a bit like his father. Father had told her and her siblings, on cold nights, of Robert Baratheon, demon of the Trident: the only man strong and fast enough to wield a hammer against swords. King Robert was red-faced and thick-bearded, had puffed his way across the courtyard, and had needed a mounting block even to get off his horse. Joffrey, though, was _handsome_. Golden-haired, with high arched brows: Joffrey had ridden in and his fine sable cloak, black as midnight, had swirled in the air behind him.

And if Father would only say yes, she would be his bride. She would be a _queen_.

She looked anxiously through the window, down onto the courtyard, but they were still carrying in cups and trenchers and flagons: nobody was even in the Great Hall yet. She sighed and her breath fogged the glass.

Behind her, Lady whined. The direwolf was lying on the bed, her bright yellow eyes shining in the candlelight. Her head tilted; one of the wolf's ears was sticking up properly this week, but the other still flopped like a puppy. Sansa took up a small horn comb she had taken last week from Arya—it wasn't as if she used it anyway— and sat on the bed next to Lady, gently running it through the thick ruff of fur at her neck. Lady had just started to grow it, and it made her look like a true direwolf, not some common dog. Sometimes, Sansa fancied that Lady understood her better than a dog would, too.

"You'll be coming with us soon, to King's Landing," she told Lady. Softly, though, so nobody could hear her speak from outside. It wouldn't do to be heard talking to herself. "You'll be the only wolf in court. Besides Arya's and Bran's, of course, but I don't think they'll be let _into_ court. They're not as well trained as you are." Lady yawned and showed all her teeth, as if to agree in her own wolfish way. Just to prove her point to herself, Sansa set down her comb and held out her hand to Lady, palm-up.

"Shake, Lady."

Lady regarded her for a long time, and then gracefully put her paw in Sansa's hand. It was bigger every day and would grow bigger still, but Lady was still the smallest of all of the direwolves, save for Jon's runt pup. Sansa gently shook Lady's paw up and down.

"Good girl."

Lady's paw tensed in her hand, and the direwolf's new ruff stood all on end. Lady stood up fully on the bed, large head just above Sansa's. There was a tangle of legs across her lap, Lady's nails scratching into Sansa's hand, and the wolf bounded across the room.

"Lady!" Sansa exclaimed, staring down at her hand; the wolf had left long reddening marks on her palm. She looked up to chastise Lady and forgot her hand altogether: the direwolf was crouched low and defensive, teeth bared, and the growl she was making was so low and deep Sansa almost couldn't hear it.

She was growling at the window.

The hair on Sansa's arms stood on end, her skin chilling. Lady had never made a sound like that, not once. Tentatively, she stood from the bed, and crossed the cool flagstones to the direwolf. Even with her floppy puppy ear and her smaller size, Lady was already bigger than most dogs in Winterfell, and more fearful than most. Her bright yellow eyes did not move from the window: the direwolf's pupils were small and sharp, and her little front teeth had spittle clinging to them. Sansa looked to the dark night outside, and then, taking a deep breath for courage, stepped in front of Lady. The direwolf pushed to her side as she walked to the sill, head warm against her knee. Sansa, shivering, looked down to the Winterfell courtyard.

The movement was easy to spot even in the low light of the evening; he was wearing bright gold and white, and his hair shone as bright as his armour. It was the man they called the Kingslayer, the queen's brother Jaime Lannister, walking across the courtyard, one arm held close to his chest. Jeyne, this afternoon, had said he was more handsome than any knight she'd ever seen. Sansa hadn't truly noticed him at the time, and her view from above made it hard to see him now; all she could tell was that he was as blonde as the other Lannisters, and taller than most. He crossed the courtyard and turned a corner around the building; the last she saw of him was his white Kingsguard cloak, stained with mud.

"It's just a knight, Lady," she said firmly to the direwolf. Lady sniffed at the air, and Sansa smiled. "Do they smell funny in all their armour?"

Lady growled, and then huffed, stalking towards the fire and lying down by the hearth. Sansa frowned at the direwolf. She would have to train Lady more; it wouldn't do to have her be afraid of the King's knights.

Except that an hour of anxious pacing brought a Kingsguard to her door, the one with the dark black beard, and Prince Joffrey. She was so excited by the presence of the crown prince that she quite forgot until she'd been escorted halfway across the castle, hand on Joffrey's arm, that Lady hadn't seemed at all concerned by either of them. The direwolf had only lifted her head to watch, and then settled back down by the fire.

She didn't worry about anything much, after that. Joffrey was wearing a crimson leather jerkin, tooled with gold that matched his hair, and he complimented her dress with a smile that made her heart melt. His eyes were a bright blue, and even when she looked away, sometimes she caught him looking at her with an expectant gaze. They made polite small talk all the way to the Great Hall, and Sansa wished the walk could have lasted forever.

When she reached the procession waiting by the closed ironwood doors of the Great Hall, she wanted to cry with the excitement of it all. Father waited by the front with Queen Cersei taking his arm; he looked unhappy, but he always looked unhappy at feasts. Father would always say that guests warmed Winterfell up too much for his liking. The Queen seemed unhappy too, but she wasn't looking straight ahead like Father; she was looking around, frowning. Queen Cersei was truly beautiful tonight; her hair was piled high in a way Sansa had never seen before, and it was so bright she almost missed the tiara of golden antlers nestled in the braids. Emeralds shone out of the antlers like cat eyes in the dark.

Behind Father and the Queen was Mother, dressed in dark blue and sparkling with black beads, and the King, crowned and dressed in dull gold silks and leathers. He looked like he'd already had a little to drink. Next came Robb, with the young Princess Myrcella grabbing onto his arm, and then, the space where she and Joffrey would stand. He led her gallantly to their place in the procession. Out of line with the others and not yet holding onto Prince Tommen's arm was Arya, and then, behind them, Bran and Rickon. Arya was looking behind her; Sansa followed her gaze.

She made brief eye contact with him and she shot her head forward quickly afterwards. Tyrion Lannister, the Imp. Sansa had never seen a dwarf before, and it wouldn't be becoming of her to stare at the first one she'd ever seen, but she did _want_ to look: she'd heard a lot about the third child of Tywin Lannister. Apparently he was a curious man, no stranger to perversions, and he had killed his mother in the birthing bed. Sansa held Joffrey's arm a little tighter.

Curiously, the third of the Lannister siblings was nowhere to be seen. Sansa wasn't too sad about that: much as she was interested to see what Jaime looked like, the way Lady had growled at him, even though he had been all the way down in the courtyard... it had put her on edge.

The ironwood doors opened, and the golden lantern light washed away her concerns.

* * *

"Go on, try it," Robb said, pushing the huge plate across the table. He was smiling in that way he did when he'd been given too much to drink. It was rare when Father was around, he typically gave them one cup and the one only, but the King had demanded more wine be given to the childrens' table until he had gotten more than a little distracted by the woman who had been serving them the wine. Arya picked up another large chunk with her hands, but Sansa hadn't tried this dish yet, and had no real intention to. She held back the grimace and politely declined.

"It's my favourite, lady Sansa, you simply must," said the princess Myrcella, whose golden curls had, by this point of the night, begun to escape her jewelled hairnet. "They wrap it in clay and bake it so they can pull out all the quills, it's quite extraordinary!"

Sansa tentatively took a small piece on the tip of her knife and bit down. It was so smothered in cameline sauce that she couldn't taste the meat itself, but it was tough and chewy and she hated every second of eating it. She swallowed awkwardly and took a deep draught of the summerwine to wash it down.

"Have you never tried hedgehog before?" said the prince, his mouth curled in amusement, and Sansa felt a rush of heat to her cheeks.

"No," she said, before adding hastily, "Prince Joffrey. We don't often cook them in Winterfell."

"Shame," the prince said. "I'm sure you'll try a great many more things once you come to King's Landing." He leaned across the table, swirling the cup in his hand. "The future queen of Westeros deserves better than this smallfolk piss. At home, we drink Arbor gold, Dornish red, apricot wine from Pentos… Myrish firewine." The crown prince's smile was slow and assured on his face, and his eyes never left hers as he spoke. He had such an intense gaze, Sansa felt as if she was drowning in it, and the heat in her cheeks was not just from the wine. Beside her, Arya made a retching sound, and Sansa held back the urge to shake her sister. Tommen cut in in that nervous voice he seemed to constantly have.

"Myrish firewine is green," he said, but the statement didn't seem to go anywhere. Tommen's face was very red from drinking. Sansa found Tommen annoying, and Joffrey seemed to agree with her.

"You ought to be in bed," Joffrey said, voice sharp. Tommen blinked back nervously.

"Go on now, little brother," Myrcella said, and Tommen rose from his seat, almost falling back as he tried to extricate himself from the bench. Bran put a hand out to steady the prince as he toppled his way across the bench, and then he promptly walked into someone's chest. The table looked up to see Jaime Lannister.

After hearing all about how handsome the Lion of Lannister was from Jeyne, Sansa glanced up with interest. Now she looked at the man, however, she felt to her surprise like Lady had been: like she wanted nothing more to growl at him until he went away. He didn't look particularly scary, not like the man with the burnt face and the dog helmet that had ridden in with Prince Joffrey, or the strange Tyrion Lannister. In fact, he was indeed _very_ handsome. He was finely dressed in crimson and gold, and a satin cloak as black as night. His hair was as blonde as his siblings', cut close around his sharp jaw, and while his nose was a little crooked, like he'd broken it long ago, Sansa had always felt that signs of knightly injury could look handsome too. He was certainly Cersei's twin— had the Queen been a man, and a knight, this would be the very one.

But something about him struck a chord, deep in her. He was a man she ought to run far, far away from, or perhaps attack if the time was right. And when he turned his head from Tommen to look right at her, _through_ her, Sansa froze in place.

He regarded her for a long time. Eventually, he plucked up a pitcher and two cups, hers and Myrcella's, from the table.

"You're too young to drink," the Kingslayer muttered, before strolling away, towards the man playing the high harp.

Sansa turned back to see Joffrey's face had paled, his eyes wide and angry. Myrcella stood up.

"I'm going to bed," she announced. "Good night, and thank you for your hospitality." She couldn't have left the hall faster if she had run. The rest of the table made hasty goodbyes; Robb politely made his leave, taking Bran away to bed, while Arya just stood up and wandered off.

Joffrey snatched Tommen's cup from where he had been sitting and poured wine into it so hastily he overfilled it, and it spilled. He pushed the cup towards Sansa, glaring at where Jaime had been.

"I will speak to Father about this," he growled. "A Kingsguard cannot steal from the future King."

"Thank you," Sansa said, although she wasn't sure how Jaime had stolen from Joffrey. She picked up the cup and drunk deep. The summerwine's sweet taste was starting to become heavy on her tongue. In the distance, a song struck up, one Sansa had never heard before. Joffrey seemed rather interested in it.

"Do you know this song?" He asked, his anger seemingly forgotten. Sansa shook her head.

"Sorry, I don't."

"You ought to. It's 'The Rains of Castamere', it was written for my grandfather Tywin." Joffrey leaned in excitedly. "_His_ father Tytos was weak, and none of his vassals respected him, especially not the Reynes or the Tarbecks. They took money from him when they wanted, and never gave it back when he asked. Eventually, grandfather rode out to demand the money back." Joffrey smiled. In the background, Sansa could hear a line, ground out in a low tone:

_In a coat of gold, a coat of red, a lion still has claws…_

"Lady Tarbeck said to him, 'you aren't the only lions in the west', and then she said, 'my brothers are coming, and their claws are as long and sharp as yours'. But Lady Tarbeck didn't know the ways of men at war, and she did not know grandfather." His smile turned jubilant, almost elated. "The fires at Tarbeck Hall were lit for a day and night, and by the time they died down, the only thing left was the last Lord Tarbeck, a child of three. Grandfather threw him down a well, I heard. And then he went on to Castamere."

Sansa's skin was pimpling with more than just the cold of the night. She suppressed a shiver.

"The Reynes retreated; they had gold mines just like the Lannisters, and so they hid in them, like cowards. Grandfather had no patience for cowards. They sent him peace terms and he ignored them. He had his men dam up a river, and the river flowed into the mines."

"No," Sansa whispered. Joffrey's eyes widened with something she couldn't place.

"I've heard some of grandfather's men say they could hear the screams for hours."

Sansa stumbled up, knocking over the wine as she did; it spilt across her dress and ruined it. She looked up at Joffrey, feeling her face heating up with tears. He looked surprised.

"Please excuse me, Prince Joffrey," she managed, before rushing from the room. The tears flowed down her cheeks all the way to her room, and she buried them in Lady's fur.

* * *

**Mance**

* * *

He had been surprised by King Robert.

He'd heard a great many things about the man that had ended three hundred years of Targaryen rule. Mance had had no love for Targaryens: Maester Aemon had never been so bad, but then hand Maester Aemon three dragons and he might not be as kind. When he had heard of the defeat of the Mad King at the hands of a man who carried a great hammer, his antlered helm as wide and proud as an eagle in flight, who had caved in the breastplate of Rhaegar Targaryen and sent rubies scattering across the Trident—

—Well, he had expected more than a red-faced man in his cups, fondling any girl of low enough birth to be beneath notice.

A clatter beside him. A man walked into the shadowed corner of the hall. Mance had set himself up where, in order to see him, you would need to walk past the screen that obscured the kitchen door; enough that he could see and not be seen. This was the first person to come near him.

Tall and blonde, sharp-eyed and finely dressed; he was a Lannister, that was for certain. The lord raised up a pitcher in one hand, two cups in the other.

"A drink for the bard," the lord said, a smile on his face that didn't quite reach his eyes. "Excellent playing, ah—"

"—Abel, m'lord," Mance said with a patient smile. "And I'm honoured, uh—"

"—Ser Jaime, of House Lannister," he said, handing him the cup and filling it. Mance waited until Jaime had tasted his own before drinking.

"Would you like a song, m'lord?" Mance offered, tasting from the cup. The lord had given him summerwine. He didn't get a lot of summer at home, and it tasted sweet and cloying. "P'raps the Rains of Castamere?"

The Lannister looked up at the tapestry of the wolf. "My lord father's song, and one I've heard too many times at too many feasts. What songs do you know that I won't, bard?"

The wine might not be worth the song if the southron would be this choosy. It would cost him time to observe the others if he had to entertain this man any longer. Mance smiled reluctantly. "I know a great many songs, but I'm afraid I don't know of your tastes."

"I've heard, this close to the Wall," the Lannister said, "many of the bards know the songs of the wildlings." He sipped deep from his cup and watched Mance. His eyes were sharp and searching, and Mance's blood turned to ice in his veins. This wasn't some idle question. Behind the Lannister, King Robert laughed, long and loud. No one had noticed the music had stopped; it was late in the evening, and the talking had become raucous and drunken. Some corners of the hall even had their own amateur bards: the dwarf Lannister seemed to be leading a chorus of 'The Dornishman's Wife'. Mance set down his cup. The kitchen door was a few paces to his left.

"Wouldn't claim to know them, m'lord."

"'Ser'", the Lannister said carefully. "I am Jaime Lannister, a knight of the Kingsguard, the White Swords. The correct title when speaking to a knight is 'ser'."

He flicked his eyes to the tapestry, drank deep again from his cup, and set it down by Mance's harp. His fingers flickered around the edge of his finely made cloak.

"Just as your correct title is 'your grace'."

He was already halfway to standing when Lannister gripped his shoulder tight and pushed him back against the wall. A blade poked at his belly.

"So it is you," Lannister murmured, his eyes wide. He almost seemed surprised.

Mance looked to see if anyone had noticed. King Robert was slapping his hands across a serving girl. The Stark girl was flicking stew onto her redhead sister's face. The dwarf Lannister's low voice rose across the Hall, joined by half a dozen drunken voices.

"But what does it matter, for all men must die—and I've tasted the Dornishman's wife!"

All eyes were turned away from their corner. It couldn't be a better situation for Jaime. Unless he were to cry out, of course, but then who would believe an unknown bard's claim over the words of the brother to the Queen? It would only tip the balance further in favour of the Lannisters.

It was a situation he hadn't anticipated. Nobody south of the Wall knew his face as 'Mance'. He joined no raiding parties, avoided his former brothers, socialised little and only as 'Abel'. And yet here was Jaime Lannister with a knife. And yet— for all this lord had found out about him, the evidence he must have somehow found— he hadn't yet done a thing.

Mance had bitten his lip when Jaime had pushed him back. He licked at the blood and looked deep in the lord's green eyes.

"If you want me dead, kill me," he said. Jaime made no move to push the knife further in, and Mance smiled. "If you have something to say— say it."

Jaime regarded him for a long moment with wide eyes. "I trust you can play and listen at the same time."

"Aye."

"Do it. I'm sure you understand you would not win in a fight against me, if you run." Jaime stepped back and leant casually against a pillar; his blade disappeared into the folds of his cloak, and Mance didn't get a chance to see where it was strapped. _Smart lord_.

Mance slid down to the stool, picked up the harp, and began to pick out a melody. The Lannister bristled as soon as the first notes were played, but he stayed where he was. Mance smiled. _But I'm smarter._

"_And who are you, the proud lord said, that I must bow so low?"_

More than a few eyes glanced in his direction now: the song of Tywin Lannister would never fail to gain interest from his family. He could see now that the Queen herself had taken notice. If Lannister was trying to hold his conversation in secret, having a few eyes on them wouldn't hurt Mance's position.

"_Only a cat of a different coat, that's all the truth I know…"_

Lannister's eyes gleamed in the light of so many candles; with every flicker of the flames, they glittered green, then blue. The lord spoke low and quick, and as he spoke he fussed with a piece of fabric at his cuffs; it looked to be the end of a bandage on his arm.

"I'm sure you know by now that summer is ending. The days are getting shorter. In a year— no, less than a year, I believe— the Citadel will send out the white ravens. But by the time winter reaches you…"

"_In a coat of gold, a coat of red…"_

"Half of your people will be dead…"

"_A lion still has claws…"_

"And fighting for the white walkers."

Mance missed a note, fingers losing their place on the strings. He had to redouble his concentration to keep the rest of the song on tempo. The hair on his arms and hands had begun to stand on end. As far as he had known, the lords of the south had never once cared of nor believed in the white walkers once they'd built their wall. He risked a glance up to Jaime as he sung. The knight looked back at him with impassive certainty. He had provoked Mance into confirming his identity, but he didn't seem to want any confirmation about the dead rising. He just seemed to _know_.

"_And mine are long, and sharp my lord__—"_

Mance fought alongside moonsingers, wargs: woods witches, skinchangers, the men who had their green dreams. It could be that Jaime saw something in the same way Orell saw through the eyes of his eagle, or Val saw strange sights in her sleep, but Mance had never once thought that southrons had the same abilities, or would ever trust in them.

His voice strained to stay in the low register of the song.

"_As long and sharp as yours."_

Jaime spoke again.

"You might not believe me. But I've seen them, and I've fought them. Your people stand no chance alone."

"_And so he spoke, and so he spoke, that Lord of Castamere…"_

"You need to bring them all south, as fast as you can. When your people come to the Wall, I will be there to let them through."

_"But now the rains, weep o'er his halls, with no-one there to hear."_

Mance plucked the repeating melody on the harp a little louder than was pleasant, and spoke so low it was almost drowned by the song.

"You've fought them, eh? When did you go beyond the Wall, Ser Jaime?"

Jaime's face twisted as if remembering. He wound one hand around the other, digging his nails into his palm.

"I didn't go beyond the Wall. They did."

Mance frowned as he plucked 'a cat of a different coat' so hard that the notes rang sour. "The walkers don't go south of the Wall."

"They _did_," Jaime said, his eyes wide and roving around the hall. "Eight years from now, the white walkers tore this castle apart. I was here. I saw it. They killed your people, and if we're to keep them alive this time, you need to take your people south."

So he _had_ dreamed something. A vision of the future, perhaps. Mance didn't trust much in visions and prophecies and magic. He could believe in it, even respect it, but he did not trust it. And he had finally placed where he'd heard the name 'Jaime'.

"What you saw, you saw," Mance said. "All men dream of ghosts. I won't put my people in the path of your soldiers because you saw them. I know you now, Lannister. You're the man they call the Kingslayer."

_That_ struck a chord. Jaime's face twitched.

"Listen to me," he snarled, leaning in closer. "I could be doing _anything_ else with my time here than talking to you. Half the people I loved most in this world are in this room when just a day ago they were dead, and _instead_ of spending time with them, I'm having to speak with you, because I was _told_ to— what do you want from me? What would convince you?"

Mance raised an eyebrow. Jaime's eyes opened wider.

"Tormund!" he said. Mance frowned.

"Tormund?"

"Giantsbane. That's his name, isn't it? He's a wildling."

"He is."

"I knew him," Jaime said. "I met him. Large man, orange hair. Strange fellow. He told us a story, about how he got his name. He… killed a giant. He… suckled milk from the giant's wife. Said it was how he grew so strong" Jaime waved his hands in the air helplessly. "And then he drank so much fermented milk I almost left the room."

It wasn't a shock to Mance that Tormund had told that story. Tormund told that story to anything with a pulse. But Tormund, before he had joined Mance, had been the Mead-king of Ruddy Hall, at the rightmost fork of the Milkwater. To travel that far, up among the Thenn mountains, had taken Mance's party three months; to convince Tormund and all nearby leaders of the necessity to band up or die, two months more: and he had travelled to the Frostfangs with them only three months before now.

For the lordling to know Tormund's appearance, strange tales down to the way he told them, and tendency to chug kumis until all in the surrounding felt ill: he'd have had to meet Tormund, or someone who knew him well. And all of those people, until three months ago, had lived five hundred miles from anyone Jaime could have met.

It wasn't proof, but it was enough to make Mance take interest.

Mance leant back, plucking out the strains of 'Alysanne'.

"What else did you see, Ser Jaime?"

* * *

**Sansa**

* * *

_When she sleeps, she dreams of dying._

_She dies twice over. The first death is simple. A man reaches out and pulls her down, and then another, and then her leg is broken, and her chest is caved in, and it is all in the dark. She feels nothing but pain, hears nothing but the rattle of rotting breath. It is over with quickly._

_The second death comes for her slowly._

_The water laps against the stone walls, so high it splashes into her mouth and tastes of salt. A tower is burning, the flames licking higher even as its black walls are submerged. Lady is beside her, large as a horse, her yellow eyes weeping yellow tears, howling a warning to her pack. Sansa can hear the meaning as well as any wolf: danger._

_Sansa looks back to the sea outside her home, and upon it she sees...something, far in the distance. At first she thinks it's driftwood, floating in the tides, but it rises, higher and higher, and then she thinks it's a wave. But a wave does not have arms, ten of them, long and black and cold as the waters that had birthed them, and a wave does not have children. _

_They come for Lady first. A long black arm pulls the wolf to the sea and uses five long limbs to rip her apart, and Sansa screams, because it is like a part of her is being stripped away. She pulls her hair back from her face and screams an order, and sword in hand, she descends into the saltwater-soaked mud of the Winterfell courtyard._

_The children of the sea swarm her people, and they swarm her, and she is buried beneath them, her sword hand trapped under her as they drown her in the mud. Far above, she can hear the scream of dragons, and the laughter of a creature less man than fish._

When Sansa woke, she screamed, and the sound joined the chorus.


	8. The Howl

Tyrion

Ayrmidion's Engines of War was an ancient text of Old Valyria, written entirely in parchment scroll, as was the fashion of most of the Valyrian writing that survived the doom. It was also tinder-dry and likely to spring aflame if given the opportunity, which Tyrion thought to be an amusing irony.

"It was a fascinating text, and one he'd never had the opportunity to find in its complete form. The Red Keep's library had a fragmentary recounting of its content, but not the details of what it actually said about said content, and so when he'd found the scroll earlier today, tucked up under endless winter granary reports from Moat Cailin, he had counted it a miracle. 

Unfortunately, a Valyrian scroll in its original form carries with it the problem of having been written in High Valyrian. Thankfully Tyrion had been instructed in the language, and he could read it a great deal better than he could speak it, but the glyphs were written in a loose, relaxed hand, and half of the terms were so unbelievably specific he had had to take five more scrolls just to try to translate the one. Not to mention he had still been quite drunk from the evening's feasts, but he wouldn't start on something this ridiculous, this late at night, without being drunk. It had gotten to the hour of the wolf, and he'd had to replace his candle three times already just to finish reading. At least he'd sobered up. 

The siege engines, however, were incredible, and the draftsmanship was fully worth the time. Whoever had copied this scroll had impeccable drawing, if not handwriting. He'd seen a lot of forms of the battering ram, but never ones designed to be used atop warships, and he had used up half his paper trying to copy down with accuracy how they worked. 

Unfortunately, he had run into a snag; a particular label of a particular part he couldn't identify from the writing or from the visual. He traced a finger across the glyph over and over, hoping that on the tenth time it would reveal its meaning. 

"Bēmagon," he muttered again, hoping that saying it aloud would bring up the answer. It was damn close to the word Ayrmidion always seemed to use for firing an engine, 'nābēmagon', but he was clearly using it in this context for an object, and the object was absolutely impossible to tell from a hundred other things. He went on and labelled the rest, just to have it done, but he finished the work and came back and he still had no earthly idea what a 'bēmagon' was and why Ayrmidion, smart bastard as he clearly was, didn't take the time to write it all out in the common tongue, just to show off.

He smoothed out the last of the scroll in the vague hope he'd find some kind of appendix. 'By the way, bemagon means 'my wife' and 'nabemagon' means 'the wrath of my wife', just a bit of a joke for anyone who reads this far, and also here's the secret to hatching dragons' might be a bit much to hope for, but a use of the word in a new context could help. If it didn't, he was going to give up for the night, take the last of the admittedly terrible wine, and spend his time drinking it with that delightful redhead from earlier.

There _was_ something written, and to his surprise he recognised the scribbled glyph of 'zaldrīzes', but a knock on the door shook him away from the text. He squinted up into the darkness.

"Who is it?"

"It's me." 

Tyrion frowned. There wouldn't be a good reason Jaime was coming to him this late at night, and he was close to certain he'd regret this conversation.

Not that Jaime seemed to care much, because he was already opening the door. Tyrion rubbed a hand across the stubble on his cheek, glaring up at his brother from the desk.

"One day, brother, you'll learn how to gain access to a room with a knightly courtesy-" 

The words died in his mouth. 

Jaime had never been a man to be especially forward with his emotions: in the years he'd lived with his older brother, Tyrion had never known him to once approach a conversation in earnest, and even when situations required his serious engagement, he refused to take anything seriously. Tyrion knew this of his brother and forgave it as one of his many, many flaws.

The look on Jaime's face now, dim in the candlelight, could have been accurately described as 'haunted', and likely wouldn't be quite enough to capture how stricken and empty his eyes were.

He looked as if he'd seen a ghost. 

"Jaime?" Tyrion asked.

Jaime closed the door behind him. He leant his forehead against the door. He made no indication of moving. He was dressed as finely as Tyrion had ever seen him: Jaime had never had a taste for dressing to a feast, and when he could, turned up in battered Kingsguard leathers. Tonight, he was dressed in crimson and gold, with a jet-black satin cape that brushed the floor. It was how he'd dress when Father was around— or when Cersei had him by the throat.

Tyrion crossed the room. From this angle, he could see that Jaime's hands, by his sides, were shaking. Fear rushed to Tyrion's throat. 

"What happened?"

Jaime inhaled, long and slow. 

"Brother," he said, "have you ever had a morning where you wake up, and it feels as if you've seen the day before?"

_Riddles, brother? Now?_ "Yes," Tyrion answered cautiously.

Jaime lifted his head from the door and looked at him, up and down, like he couldn't believe what he was seeing.

"Have you got any wine?" Jaime asked suddenly, striding across the room to a pitcher without asking. He moved oddly; as he positioned a cup and poured the wine, he did it all with his left hand, holding his right to his chest like a wounded bird. Jaime downed the glass in a single motion, and grimaced.

"That's poor. I would have expected better of you. No, you see, I— I woke up this morning, and I _had_ seen this morning before." Jaime stared up at the wall. "And the morning after it. And every morning hence for the next six years."

Tyrion blinked.

"Jaime," he began slowly, "Could it be possible this isn't your only drink this evening?"

Jaime groaned and slammed the cup into the table.

"This afternoon, you slept with a redhead whore."

"I sleep with a lot of whores," Tyrion snapped back impatiently. "I don't see what it has to do with- "

"In two days, you decide to ride north with the Night's Watch so you can—" Jaime tipped his hand in the air. "—'stand on top of the Wall, and piss off the edge of the world'."

He hadn't mentioned that plan yet to Jaime— he'd only formed it after speaking to Ned Stark's brother this evening. He certainly hadn't _said_ that, though it sounded like something he'd say. Tyrion realised Jaime was trying to _prove_ his absurd statement. _This isn't the strange announcement of a drunk man. He truly believes this. _

"In six years," Jaime went on, "You die." He was looking at him oddly, blinking as if holding back tears, but Tyrion had never, _not once_, known his brother to cry. He could only hope this was an absurd attempt to be funny.

"Well, I can only hope I die with dignity," he said, trying for a light tone.

Jaime turned fully away. "You don't," he said, his voice hitching a little.

Tyrion went cold. _He's lost his mind._

Jaime wiped at his face fiercely and turned back. He _was_ crying. He needed to get his brother to a maester, that much was certain, and he needed to encourage Jaime to do it in a way that wouldn't draw attention from anyone in the castle.

"Well, I'm not dead yet," Tyrion tried. "So there's a small victory. It's getting late; if you're finding it hard to sleep, don't keep me up, go find something to—"

Jaime shook his head vehemently.

"I'll prove it," he snapped. He unfastened his cape and let the satin pool at the ground around him; he started to unlace his jacket.

Tyrion was, by this point, close to calling for help. If Jaime stripped naked in his room like a madman, people would get the impression Jaime was sleeping with entirely the wrong sibling.

"Jaime, you can keep your clothes on—"

"Oh, shut it," he snapped. "I'm taking the jacket off, just give me a moment, damn you."

Tyrion itched to go for the door, but he resolved to wait until Jaime had done whatever he seemed determined to do. His brother always carried a weapon, after all, and could be dangerous in a state like this. Jaime started to talk as he unlaced it.

"I knew you wouldn't believe a word of it," he said irritably, a tear still dripping down his face. "And why would you? When I woke up this morning I didn't either."

He stripped the jacket off. He was wearing a dark linen shirt, but at one cuff, Tyrion could see a flash of white bandage. Jaime pulled up the sleeve. The bandage was wrapped around his forearm entirely, and he began to unwind it.

"I was sent back six years in time," Jaime said, "but however that's done, he told me it needed blood. My blood."

Tyrion's head was throbbing. "Jaime, you need to think about what you're saying—"

"—You need to _look_," Jaime said. "I didn't believe it until I tested it for myself."

He unstuck the bandage from his arm and pulled it off, and Tyrion's breath stopped short.

There was a neat slice across the top of Jaime's arm, and his flesh had not yet stuck back together: it lay open, like a cut a butcher would make in a dead pig. And there was no blood. The wound glittered with something else, and it had set as hard and clear as ruby. It looked _wrong_. He came closer to inspect it. He turned Jaime's arm this way and that to look at how it shone in the light. Jaime's voice came as a whisper.

"It didn't hurt," he murmured. "I cut it and it bled _sap_, and I could barely feel I'd done it at all."

A knife flashed across his arm again and Tyrion made a noise at the back of his throat to tell him to stop, but he was too fascinated not to watch as a second, shallower cut joined the first.

Jaime's arm sliced open like meat, and stayed open. The liquid that slowly pooled from the flesh was too slow, too viscous, to be blood; it flowed down his arm, crystallised in the hair in small shining beads. Tyrion raised a shaking hand to the cut, pushed at it. It was truly flesh, that much was certain. He looked at the fluid on his finger; it was sticky and cold, and shone unnaturally red. It smelled sweet.

Tyrion had lived long enough to know when something in front of his eyes was a mummer's trick or legitimate reality, and there was no way, _no way at all_, a man could cut into his arm and have it bleed the wrong thing.

_But Jaime was_ _bleeding tree sap_.

Tyrion stepped back, and then back again. _Mother have mercy._

Jaime wrapped the bandage back around his arm, and shook down his shirtsleeve.

"Will you at least listen to what I have to say?"

Tyrion's mouth was dry.

"I need to sit down," he said, and walked slowly to the bed. Jaime sat on the desk's chair, watching Tyrion expectantly. Tyrion's head felt as if it was going to fall off, and he sat down heavily on the mattress, cradling his head in his hands.

"Tyrion?"

"Start talking," he ground out.

"I—" Jaime cut off. "I truly don't know where to start," he said. "For me, this day… it was six years ago. I'm not the same man anymore. Neither are you. So much happened I barely know what to begin with."

"I do," Tyrion said. "Tell me what happened to your arm."

Jaime considered his arm; he flexed his fingers into a fist, and released them. "Quite a lot," he said. "The hand was cut off, for one."

"Your hand."

"A few years ago, yes."

Tyrion looked Jaime over. "It seems to have grown back." 

"This isn't the same body," Jaime said. "I'm younger, I have the same hair, I have the hand back. Whatever of me came back to this day, it wasn't—." He waved the bandaged arm around. "This."

"You keep saying that," Tyrion said. "Sent back, came back. What for?" A ridiculous idea came into his head, but tonight was a night for insanity. "Are you here to save my life?" He offered, smiling, but Jaime didn't return it.

"Yours and others," he said. Tyrion shifted uncomfortably.

"You said you were sent back in time."

"I was. I have been." Jaime said emphatically.

"Why?"

"We lost a war."

"Against who?"

"Against _what_," Jaime said. "Against the white walkers."

The Winterfell air cooled against Tyrion's skin. He looked at Jaime searchingly, and Jaime looked back, earnest.

"The white walkers." Tyrion repeated.

"I didn't believe they were real," Jaime said. "Neither did the small council. The Night's Watch warned us, years before, but we all dismissed it out of hand." He shook his head. "We were too busy fighting other battles amongst ourselves. By the time they attacked, half the forces of Westeros were gone already."

"The white walkers _aren't_ real," Tyrion insisted, but then men don't bleed _tree sap_. He was starting to think the easiest way to resolve this conversation was to drink until he didn't recall it the next morning.

"They are," Jaime said. "Tyrion, I saw them. I fought them. We lost. I've been sent back to try and _fix it_."

Tyrion pushed his hands backwards through his hair. This was insanity. This was true insanity. If he believed this for a single moment, he would be lost in the mire of madmen, and Cersei would be the last sane Lannister left. _Now wasn't that a thought?_ It led him to a better question than anything involving white walkers.

"And if you need to… save the world from white walkers," Tyrion said, "Why come tell _me_?"

"Who else would I tell?" Jaime gestured to the walls of the castle. "Who else can I _trust_?"

"Our sister, perhaps?"

Jaime stared at him. And then laughed. He laughed so long and hard Tyrion was certain he really had gone mad.

"Trust Cersei," Jaime said, wiping at his eyes.

"I'm not saying I would. She'd listen to you."

"You truly have no idea how funny that is—

Tyrion stopped. He could hear something.

"-XXXX-"

"Shh." Tyrion held a hand up, and Jaime fell silent.

A wolf's howl echoed through the castle.

And then another.

Wolf joined wolf until there was a cacophony of howling, and then high piercing screams joined the call, and the sound rung like a bell, echoing all the way. By the time it rung against the walls of Tyrion's chamber, it was as if a hundred ghosts pounded at the walls and screamed in fury.

Tyrion jolted back at the same time Jaime lurched forward, knife drawn in his left hand.

"What in the _seven hells_―"

"That didn't happen before," Jaime said, voice low. He crossed the room, flung open the door and stalked out into the howling corridors.

Tyrion contemplated staying exactly where he was and barring the door. It would be the sensible choice on a night like tonight. Perhaps even the only choice, when he couldn't trust anyone not to do or say something mad tonight. His hands, however, were already placing a candle into a lantern of smoked glass, and his traitorous legs had already carried him to the door. He pushed on into the darkness.

The howls and screams subsided as one, and the echoes dimmed and fall silent. The corridors were so dark at this time of night, the meagre lantern-light barely lit the next step ahead of him. He realised, dimly, that he didn't know where he was going. Why had he left his chambers? Why was he walking on, unarmed, towards screaming in the night?

Perhaps Jaime hadn't gone mad. Perhaps _he_ had.

He couldn't hang onto the thought. It slid in his head and away, replaced by his own breathing, the onward journey, and the sounds ahead of him. The rush of people stirring, leaving their rooms, walking. He could hear them ahead and behind and below, and more light filtered through the corridor as more candles were carried from place to place. Tyrion turned a corridor and found himself amongst a crowd, being pushed through by an unmistakeable man.

"Make way!" Robert snarled, sending servants and noblemen alike scattering as he barged forward. Tyrion slipped into the wake he was leaving and walked behind him next to Trant.

The entire household seemed to be pressed into a single corridor. Up ahead were dozens of men, women, and candles flickering on the walls, and urgent, low conversation, punctuated by sobs. Tyrion caught a glimpse of a child on the floor. Tyrion spotted Jaime at the front of the crowd as Robert pushed past him; Tyrion found himself next to him, at the front of the crowd, and beneath him lay the eldest of the Stark girls, sobbing.

She was propped against the wall, shivering, her eyes open but unfocused. Even as Catelyn Stark clutched her by the shoulders and urged her to speak, she didn't so much as look at her mother's face. Her face was flushed red and in her hands, clutched tight into fists, were hunks of long auburn hair. Ned was crouched down, further along the corridor, with two others; the eldest Stark boy, Robb, and the youngest Stark girl. The girl was crying, but seemed to be forcing out words to her father between sobs. Robb, however, had his hair clutched in his hands, crouched on the ground, rocking back and forth, entirely inconsolable. Every so often, he ran his hands feverishly around his neck, and something about the motion made Tyrion's blood chill in his veins.

At the back of the corridor, Winterfell's maester had the shuddering form of the youngest child in his arms, who was wailing, loud and long. The older boy, Bran, clutched at the maester's legs. Standing beside them, face so pale he looked close to death, was Jon Snow.

Every closed door in the corridor juddered and shook. At first, Tyrion thought it was a wind in the night, but the corridor was still.

_The direwolves, _he realised. _They're throwing themselves against the doors._

Tyrion tried to catch Snow's eye; of all the people in the room, he had at least spoken to the bastard tonight, and while he couldn't say if the boy had particularly appreciated the advice he had given him, he could at least try to speak with him again; ask what had happened. Snow, however, had one hand rested against the wall, as if he would fall without it. He barely looked better than his trueborn siblings: his eyes were wide and round, and he was staring into nothing.

As Tyrion glanced back down, the Stark child— Bran— caught his eye. Unlike his siblings, he wasn't crying. His face was wet with tears, but his expression was solemn and drawn.

Robert leant down next to Ned, hand on the Stark's shoulder. They exchanged words, quick and low, and the King stood back up, regarding the crowd.

"Out! Get out, all of you!" The King commanded, face pale.

The crowd began to disperse, behind them, but Tyrion felt stuck in place. Catelyn tucked her head into Sansa's neck, whispering urgently. The girl stared into empty air, shaking. Jaime laid a hand on Tyrion's shoulder, pulling urgently until Tyrion could drag his eyes from the sight.

The walk back to the Guest House took a lot longer than they had come; they took multiple wrong turns, and there was the small problem of Tyrion having lost his mind. He mentioned this to Jaime once he'd slammed the door shut behind him.

"I've lost my mind," he said.

"So has the rest of Winterfell, if that's any comfort," Jaime said.

"I've lost my mind," Tyrion said again, hoping that more emphasis might help him find the way through the waking dream he seemed to be stuck in. Jaime, the fucker, seemed entirely unconcerned by his brother's insanity, and rather than put him out of his misery seemed determined to drag him back into it.

Jaime looked out the window, peering down at the courtyard. "That very definitely didn't happen, the last time."

"Oh, good," Tyrion said. "Perhaps now the grumpkins won't eat us." 

"White walkers," Jaime corrected unhelpfully. "There was… something about that. About whether or not anything could be changed this time." He stared through the window. "I didn't expect this much to change, this fast."

Tyrion rubbed at his temples. "'Something about'… who told you all this? Who sent you back?"

Jaime glanced back. "Brandon Stark."

"The boy."

"Not by then." Jaime's jaw worked. "He said he was something different." He rubbed one hand over the other, as if checking it was still there. "Whatever happened to him… He could do some sort of witchcraft, by the end. Still can."

Tyrion started. "Still can?"

Jaime looked up at the ceiling. "He's in the trees."

"Excuse me?"

"He's in the weirwood trees." Tyrion groaned and Jaime stepped forward insistently. "He is! He told me about the blood, he told me to find a man at the feast and knew his name when I did not. He wasn't quite human when I knew him, it's not… past the point of reason, that he's somehow speaking through the weirwood."

Bran's solemn, tear-streaked face came to mind. He had seemed calm in the midst of all his siblings gripped in madness.

For reasons Tyrion couldn't quite grasp, this, to him, tipped the balance in favour of embracing insanity. The events of the night all seemed to make, in its own way, and with a few gaps in the storytelling, its own form of sick, ridiculous sense.

Assuming everything was as true as Jaime's impossible lack of blood. Assuming the white walkers and time changing, the Stark boy's voice in the weirwood, all of it. It meant that between Jaime waking this morning and the unexplainable events of the last few minutes, his brother had already changed the past. And that Jaime was now the sole force keeping them from hurtling towards whatever destruction was coming towards them, _may the gods show us mercy_, and had already managed to somehow drive every single child of Ned Stark to some kind of insanity.

Which meant, assuming all the above, that Tyrion needed to know what had changed, _now_.

Tyrion reluctantly crossed the floor to the desk. He shuffled the papers around, selected the ones with the least amount of drafting, and laid them out smooth on the desk.

"Pour me some wine."

"I'm sorry?" 

We're going to be here a while, pour me some wine." 

Jaime frowned. "Don't I get any wine?" 

"I need you sober. And I need me to not be sober." 

Jaime's strange look came over him again, the one with his wide and unguarded eyes, and Tyrion had to look away from it. He had to keep a handle on himself while he had some kind of plan. He sat on the desk, dipped a quill in ink and poised it over the page.

"Start from the beginning."


	9. Seal of Devotion

Jaime

* * *

**His knees have gone numb from kneeling at the feet of the Warrior. Through the night, as he had knelt in the meagre sept of some tiny Westerlands town, he had swayed with exhaustion: he had fought in his first true battle the night before, and had been desperate for sleep even as he'd laid his sword and armour down for the vigil.**

**But he's stayed upright, somehow, and when the sunlight turns the sept seven colours of stained glass, Arthur Dayne walks in. He's dressed in the gold and white of the Kingsguard, a three-headed dragon wrapped in filigree wrought on his chest, and he nods to see Jaime, swaying but awake. The sept's light seems to make the dragon dance on his chest.**

"You've done well," **he says, the morning calling back a slight Dornish accent to his voice**. "The man that knighted me found me curled up on top of my sword, sleeping like a baby."

**Jaime's face must betray his surprise―****_the finest knight of the Seven Kingdoms slept through his knights' vigil?_****― because Dayne raises an eyebrow.**

"Don't look at me like that," **he chides**. "I was young, and I'd cracked my head in the battle besides."

"Sorry, ser," **he replies instantly, feeling for a moment like he's under Father's gaze. They share the same pale blue eyes. But Dayne has a milder face, despite his greater prowess with a sword, and he offers his hand to help Jaime up. Jaime hides his wince when he stands, but Arthur notices where the vigil has left his knees cut and bleeding, soaking through his clean linen trousers. The stone floor of the sept was cracked and uneven, there had been no way to avoid it.**

"I would ask a question of you, Jaime Lannister," **Dayne says. Jaime tries not to feel the flicker of fear that curls in his gut.**

"What would you ask, Ser Arthur?"

"You're squired to the Lord of Crakehall and you defended him well in the ambush, as would be expected of you. And yet, after you had seen him to safety, you sent him off with the Frey boy and rejoined the fight." **Dayne looks at him so long Jaime feels cold, even despite the fact that spring had come a month ago**. "Why did you do so?"

**In truth, Jaime hadn't made any sort of decision on the matter; he had just screamed at Merrett to get Lord Sumner on the horse and rushed back into the battle. He had thought nothing of it in the moment.**

**But 'I don't know' is a fool's answer, Lord Tywin had taught him that much, and so Jaime hedges his bets and answers,** "It was the right thing to do."

**Dayne's eyes shimmer violet in the light of the sept.**

"And what of the Smiling Knight?"

**The Smiling Knight had consumed his thoughts all morning. When Jaime had rejoined the fray, he had seen the Smiling Knight emerge from the trees, and try to attack Ser Barristan from behind. Jaime had surged forward and matched sword to sword, and the Smiling Knight's rictus grin had contorted with laughter to see him. The infamous mad knight had carved his flesh to match his name, and Jaime could see all his teeth flashing, even the back ones.**

"Fight then, boy!" **he laughed, and fight Jaime had.**

**It had become apparent to him in seconds that the Knight was better than any man he'd ever fought in earnest. He was as wild as they said, and he swung so hard and wide it would leave him open, but he had used the momentum to break Jaime's guard and rush forwards with animal speed, forcing Jaime to retreat. Jaime was fast, but not near as fast as the Smiling Knight. He blocked each slashing blow the Knight threw his way, but he was on the defense and tiring. It could be in ten seconds, it could be in two minutes, but the Knight was going to win.**

"Back!" **a voice had called, deathly calm.** "I do not think you wish to fight a squire tonight, ser."

**The Smiling Knight had swept his sword from a cutting blow and sidestepped, and Jaime stumbled back as Ser Arthur Dayne, Sword of the Morning, had stepped in. His dark hair was matted with blood, his chest heaving with the extertion of battle, but his face had betrayed no fear, and his fabled sword Dawn had shone in the moonlight.**

**Jaime had no idea why he'd done ****_that_****, either. If his blood hadn't been up, he likely wouldn't have thought himself capable of winning a fight against a man like that.**

"He was attacking Ser Barristan Selmy, ser." **He said, and hoped it would suffice for an answer. "**May I ask you a question?"

"You may."

"Who knighted you?"

**Arthur looked up to the stained glass windows.**

"The man who charged me with my vows was Ser Duncan of the Kingsguard."

**_Duncan the Tall._****Jaime felt a thrill at that. He didn't exactly believe in the concept of a true knight, but if he had he would have imagined them to be like Duncan. He had been a great man by the word of every story that spoke of him, and a swordsman enough to defend his morals to the death.**

**Arthur does not draw his eyes from the stained glass.**

"But, Jaime, I was knighted by the Warrior. As you shall be, and as all knights have been. The first knights of the Andals were charged their vows by the Warrior himself, and so they charged their vows, and on in an unbroken chain to today." **He speaks so gently it is almost drowned by the sound of birdsong; it is a far cry from the unwavering shout of his voice on the battlefield. Finally, he turns to Jaime.**

"I have knighted two men in my turn," **Dayne says.** "You are to be the third. I do not choose this lightly. You might be the heir to House Lannister, but I expect you to take the order of knighthood as seriously as it deserves."

**He shakes his head vehemently**. "I would rather be a knight than a Lannister," **he says, and he's surprised to realise he means it. He hopes Dayne won't tell his lord father.**

**Dayne's bushy eyebrows raise and his forehead crinkles.** "I expect in time, you will have to learn to be both," **he says**. "But this morning, only one needs to matter."

**He gestures down at the blood sticking Jaime's trousers to his legs.**

"Blood,"** he says,** "is the seal of our devotion. All knights must bleed to prove it. Did you take any injury, in the fight?"

"No, ser." **He replies. He'd been quite proud of that; even Ser Barristan had left the fight with a cut above his eye, and only he and Ser Arthur had left the fight with nothing but other men's blood on their armour. Now, however, he feels that he has done something egregiously wrong, and isn't quite sure how to fix it. He shifts a little where he stands and hopes this answer doesn't stop him from being knighted by the Sword of the Morning. **"I'm sorry, ser."

"Not much to be done about it now," **Dayne shrugs.** "And I don't reckon a grazed knee counts. We will have to make do."

**He leads Jaime back to the field the Smiling Knight had died in; there's still a patch of grass, a little ways away, slick with blood. Ser Barristan has come to watch, to Jaime's surprise. His head is wrapped in gauze, and he smiles and nods at Jaime. Jaime smiles and nods back, nervous.**

**Arthur draws his greatsword. Dawn, the blade of the Sword of the Morning, has been the ancestral sword of the Daynes for ten thousand years. It's as sharp as the day it was forged. It is no Valyrian steel, marbled with grey: the steel is bright and pale as milkglass. He's heard the tale of Starfall a thousand times and ways. Once he had even told it himself to Tyrion, though he hadn't been much good at telling it. A star had fallen on Dorne, thousands of years before Dorne was Dorne. And the Daynes, before they had even had a name or a home, had found it. They'd forged the star into a blade, and had built their homes on the spot, and in the thousands of years since had only gifted it to the knights of the house of Dayne worthy of wielding it. Arthur was the first Sword in the Morning to have been named in fifty years. The blade's guard is new; the star of Dawn, set in moonstones, had been preserved, but it is laced in the Kingsguard filigree.**

**He lifts Dawn and it shimmers in the sunrise. **"Kneel, Jaime of the house Lannister."

**Jaime kneels in the dew-laced grass and bows his head. **

"In the name of the Warrior, I charge you to be brave."

**He frowns; he can hear two voices speaking. He glances up and all of a sudden he is looking down instead, the chill air of Winterfell weighing on his skin and a sword in his left hand. He switches the blade to Brienne's right shoulder. He is marvelling she trusts him to put a blade so close to her neck. Only years before he would have done so in earnest.**

"In the name of the Father, I charge you to be just."

**The air is warm and bright and Arthur Dayne poises the edge of the blade against Jaime's shoulder instead of the flat. It is an old Andal tradition, still observed by those with the sword control to do so. Dawn is so unspeakably sharp it cuts away Jaime's Lannister cloak where it lies gently on his shoulder. Before he raises the blade, he lowers it just a touch, so slight that Jaime would have thought it a mistake from anyone else, and slices Dawn against his shoulder. Jaime startles, and looks up to see Dayne is smiling, just barely. A trickle of blood flows down his back. ****_A seal of my devotion_****, he thinks, and bows his head again to hide his smile.**

"In the name of the Mother, I charge you to defend the innocent."

**Jaime sets the flat of his blade against Brienne's shoulder. He does not think of much at all. The words are ringing in his head loud enough to drown out the rest of the world. He tilts his head and says them with all the conviction she deserves.**

"Arise, Ser Jaime-"

"Arise, Ser Brienne-"

**The world flows to a halt in two lands. He looks up, and down, and two ravens land on two swords. The raven that lands on Widow's Wail is black and bedraggled, and its third eye glints in the firelight. The raven that perches on the blade of Dawn, talons digging into the steel's edge, is a Citadel bird, the white raven of winter, and its third eye shines red from its plumage.**

"_Hello, old friend_."

"Hello, Bran."

**The ravens tilt their heads.**

"_It seems that time is indeed malleable_."

"And not only that," **Jaime adds,** "Entirely fucked."

"_You spoke with Mance Rayder?_"

"We can talk about Mance in a damn moment," **Jaime interrupts.** "What happened to the children?"

The raven on Widow's Wail chittered and quorked, but the white raven on Dawn merely watched him with the big red eye. They spoke as one.

"_In another life_," **they say**, "_My brothers and sisters could have been as I became. If you had pushed another child from the window, they would have become the Three-Eyed Raven. Their dreams are not mine to see, and I do not know what cause them, but I can be sure they dreamed of truth_."

**Jaime chills at that.**

"_Keep the wolves safe_," **the ravens say.**

"I shall," **Jaime promises, even if he's unsure what Bran means. The ravens seem unhappy still.**

"_Do you know what dawn breaks today?_"

**Jaime has lost track of time; he is in three places at once**. "No."

"_Today is the day you pushed me from the First Keep_."

"No," **he insists.** "Not anymore. I will undo it, I promise you that."

"_It is good to hear you shall not push me twice, but this does not undo what has been done."_ **The raven on Widow's Wail scrapes a talon against the Valyrian steel.** "_No man might remember but you and I, but we both know the path you chose. The first path. I will not forget it_."

**Jaime, distantly, feels pain. He's not sure which of his bodies feel it. He remembers a voice, distant and gentle― 'how do you know there is an afterwards?'**

"I'm sorry." **He means it**. "I shall always be sorry. I'm not the man I once was."

**The ravens watch him in silence for so long he is not sure if he is dead. He does not break the silence- he waits the eternity for them to speak.**

"_You spoke with Mance Rayder_?"

"I did," **he rushes out.** "We've agreed upon a course of action. He will amass his people beyond the wall, across the next year. I will return to King's Landing to convince Robert of the white walkers, and on the year's passing, I will ride to the Wall, open the gates to Mance, and once he thinks it safe, he will lead his people across."

"_And what of the Night's Watch?_"

"They're a problem easier solved with a royal decree. I'll get that first and worry about them second."

"_The Night's Watch serve no kings_."

"They'll serve one king or another by the end of the year. I'd rather it was Robert.'

**To this, the ravens chitter agreement.**

"_I will watch the north and inform you of events coming to pass, when I can. We have a year to prepare the details_."

"Good. Jaime?"

"Yes?"

_"__I understand your wish to tell Tyrion the truth_—"

**He shivers in three bodies. He knew Bran had strange eyes in strange places, he's felt how Bran does it: but in every room? In every place in Winterfell?****_ How did he see them, alone in Tyrion's chamber?_**** The ravens go on.**

"—_But he is the first and last person you inform without my permission. If the wrong person finds out, the risk is too great. Do you understand?_"

He unfortunately does. He's not blind to the opportunism of ambitious men. Time itself is a dangerous tool to reveal to an enemy. At least he got to tell Tyrion first.

"I do."

"_I need you to speak with Jon Snow today_."

**Of all the people in Winterfell, kings and lords alike, he hadn't expected Bran would have prioritised Jon Snow. King in the North he might have been in the last lifetime, but the man he had become was not the bastard boy he was now.** "Why?"

_"__Do not worry about the why; that is my concern. I need you to convince him not to take the black. Let him go north with Benjen, if he must, but steer him away from taking his vows."_

**Jaime wants to ask an awful lot about this, but he hopes it will make sense in time. It's an easier task than convincing Mance Rayder he's an emissary from the future, and he can be thankful for that.**

"I shall."

"_Do not come back when you are done; go on the hunt with the King. We shall speak next on the Kingsroad south."_

**Jaime never went on hunts with the King. Not for lack of interest; he simply used the time to fuck Cersei. He supposed he wouldn't be doing that this time. ****_Perhaps not ever_****, he thinks, and is surprised by his own finality**. **He nods.**

_"__There is nothing more to discuss."_

Jaime jolted his hand from the weirwood, his bandaged arm tingling along the cuts. His legs ached; he took a step and realised he'd locked his legs in place where he'd stood. How long had he been standing there?

He shook his legs out as he walked through the godswood. It was dawn, and Tyrion had kicked him out of his chambers so he could sleep just before the sun had risen. His brother, who he was so unbelievably _happy_ to see alive, had cursed him as he'd locked the scrawled-on papers into a chest.

"Ice dragons, Jaime," he had snarled. "Dragons are one thing, white walkers quite another, and you somehow managed to make it all worse." Tyrion had been quite drunk by this point. Jaime had been able to sneak a half-cup the whole night, and had been too stressed to complain it hadn't been his fault. "If it turns out you managed to break the Stark children as well, I'm shipping myself across the Narrow Sea."

Jaime hadn't mentioned that Tyrion would be repeating himself. He had skipped quite a lot of history, in the telling. There was no point in telling Tyrion he'd murdered Father, nor why. He didn't want to think of the Sept of Baelor wreathed in green smoke. He especially didn't want to see his brother's face when he would have to explain his connection to Bran. And it would have caused too many questions to mention a thing of Brienne, and too many of those he wouldn't have been able to answer. _Why did you kiss her?_ I don't know. _Why did you only do it when you were certain you were both going to die?_ I don't know. _Do you love her?_

Jaime stumbled on the stone pathway that leads him out of the godswood. He stared at the paving stones. _Do I love her?_

_Do I-_

He pushed himself on. _Don't think about it, don't think about it, don't think about it_. It was just because he hadn't slept yet. He didn't feel tired yet, either; probably from the stress of travelling six years overnight. He walked across the empty courtyard instead, and let the cool of the morning wind brush his overlong hair back. The summer snows hadn't continued, but it was cold enough for them, and the breeze settled his nerves, even if they didn't bury the question rolling over and over through his head.

When he passed by the training yard, as empty as the rest of the castle's yards at dawn, his nerves were such that he walked straight onto them without a thought. Drilling would clear his head, at least.

He swiped at thin air when he tried to draw, looked down, and felt a thrill in his heart. A rare burst of joy.

_Oh_.

He unsheathed his sword.

Even holding the blade in his right hand felt like an unspeakable luxury.

He had tried to accept, over the last three years, that no matter how he railed against the world it wouldn't bring his hand back. He had found out for himself that he wasn't purely his sword, and he had discovered a path in life he could, uneasily, tread. He had found himself as a man outside of a fight. In time, and painfully, he had even found himself as a man outside of the Kingsguard. He hadn't found a _place_, but he had found purpose, at least.

All that didn't mean he wouldn't have traded half the world to have his old one back.

He shifted his footwork and gripped the sword with both hands, moving into his old and favoured guard position. Right hand above the sword, left hand below it and gripped at the pommel, held close to the chest and high up, the blade pointed direct at the enemy. It was a flashy pose, not often useful for a true fight, but on occasion he employed it to show his confidence. Confidence had once been a great tool of his for ending a fight before it began; that and his reputation.

He moved into an entry strike, and then a follow-up, hard and fast. His hands moved as they ought to, and stayed attached to his wrists. He laughed, then, wild and hysterical, and sheathed the sword, dragging a tattered straw dummy into a standing position.

He didn't want to drill slow today. In time, he would need to go carefully and make sure he could re-form his instincts from the left-handed ones he'd trained into himself, but this morning his opponent was only straw and he'd missed this. _He needed this_.

Over hew, side hew, under hew. Straw sailed from the snow-sodden dummy as he swung, switched grip to swing high and hard in a part-hew, slicing the head in half. He swirled with the momentum, all the way around, and explosively struck a wrath-hew, diagonally all the way up from hip to shoulder. The dummy fell apart and tumbled to the ground.

Jaime breathed hard, in and out. He felt his nose warm and his eyes pinprick with tears, but he forced them down. He couldn't let it become a habit to cry.

He had forgotten how it had felt to have the sword feel at ease in his hand. His instincts were wrong; the other foot itched to stand forwards, and he had led with the left too much and let the sword swing at an odd camber, but it was _fixable_.

He drilled through the guards, every one he knew, and then every cut, fast and explosive. It was far more impatient than he ought to, but he wanted to feel it more than do it right, and it felt good. His sword sung in his hand, and his heart soared with the motion. He felt like he was _flying_ across the yard.

The weirwood had dug up some odd memories about swords and swordsmanship, and as he ran through some transitions his mind drifted to Arthur Dayne. He had only known him two years, and had only been his sworn brother for one: they had served side by side for a few scant months before Dayne had left to protect Rhaegar Targaryen, and Jaime had been left behind. He's not sure why, when the first of his memories to be drawn out by Bran was of his twin, this time he had thought of a man who had only been in his life for a twentieth of the time.

He poised a hardwood block and switched his Kingsguard longsword out for a tourney sword, letting the ferocity of his swings ricochet across the courtyard. If he was to examine his own feelings— something he rarely did, but then he rarely travelled through time and had his blood replaced with magical tree sap either— he'd suppose it was down to missing swordsmanship, and the chance to take it back. Arthur Dayne, Barristan Selmy, Duncan the Tall; they had all been paragons of the sworn brotherhood. Jaime had never been a true knight, and certainly never would be: Bran would have to turn time back a few decades to fix that. Jaime had needed a hand cut off to learn basic humanity, while Arthur Dayne could have taken a piss with his right hand and defended orphans with his le—

Jaime stalled mid-swing. The tourney sword clattered against the wood.

_Because Arthur hadn't always used Dawn in combat, had he?_

Jaime scrambled across to the rack of tourney swords.

He picked out a twin.


	10. Wolfswood

**Cersei**

* * *

She knew what he was doing.

They had been performing this dance around each other from the day they had been born; by this time, it had become as familiar as the breath in her lungs.

The whole ride to Winterfell, Cersei had been trying to encourage Jaime to, for once, take on a position of power. She misliked Jon Arryn's death and everything it stood for, and she could feel their safe ground turning to sand beneath their feet. She'd had nothing to do with his demise, but Pycelle had watched him for her on his deathbed, to make sure he passed. Poison, the maester had told her, and the day after she had begun working on Jaime and Robert to try and elevate her brother to the Hand's position. Robert had heard none of it, and Jaime had been not only indifferent but actively amused by the concept. Cersei had been hoping against hope that one of them would move, but the closer they had gotten to Winterfell, the further her hopes had run. Clearly, however, being asked to take responsibility had finally become distasteful to Jaime, and he wished to make her suffer.

He had been avoiding her since they had arrived; more than was customary between them in public. He was taking himself away, speaking to everyone but her, playing his little game of making her jealous. It would work, _damn him_, and she would have to sit there and watch until she had her next moment to storm upon him. She would hit him, or he would grab her, and they'd let their anger out wordlessly, and it would curl a fire in her of rage and want. By this point, he would always have a smile on his face, sharp as a knife. He would be trying to start a conversation, because he always wanted to prove how he could make her laugh even when she was deep in fury and lust. He would win, because he had a way of making the darkest things into a joke. He would smile gleefully when he did, he liked winning, and she would scream soundlessly and push him, slap him, because she knew that's how he liked it, and his smile would slide to want, and _she_ would win, because she _liked winning_.

He had been testing her since they had come to Winterfell. The feast had been cruel, even for him. Robert had been worse than usual, had dragged off some serving girl to plant his seed in her even as the Starks watched him leave, and Jaime hadn't bothered to turn up on time. When he'd finally shown up, he'd ignored her, but had some harpist sing the 'Rains of Castamere', just to remind her he was there. She'd set her jaw and turned her fury to thoughts of what she'd do to him when she next saw him. She'd seen the ruined tower and the First Keep beside it; it would do well for when Robert went on his hunt. She was going to make him beg for her this time.

A Lannister pays her debts, and a twin pays like with like. She'd make him desperate, make him beg, fuck him senseless and then ignore him for the ride down. He'd be dragging her to the ruined sept by the time they made it to Harrenhal.

Perhaps by then, he'd be rethinking matters. It was too late to try and make Jaime Hand of the King, that opportunity had been lost, but there were options that would solidify their position after Jon Arryn's untimely death. Stannis had left the capital, information she was greatly concerned about. Robert wouldn't hear of it for a week yet— she had faster messengers, and all of them better paid. Before that, gods willing, Robert would hear of the marriage between Daenerys Targaryen and the horselord, and he would get sufficiently incensed to shift his attentions east.

Despite the danger of Arryn's death, it had opened positions, and with it, options. The new Warden of the East was Robin Arryn. He had been a sickly boy the last she'd seen of him, and controlled totally by that mad bitch Lysa. If Robert were to be fearful enough of the Dothraki, he might be persuaded to name a Warden who could defend the coast that faced them; a man with experience at war. Wardens were largely wartime positions, but Robert had been desperate for a war anyway.

If the Lannisters held the East and West, it might be enough to keep them safe, had Stannis been investigating what she feared. If not… well, Lancel held the King's wine, and she held Lancel. She would find a way.

The Starks were on edge today, after their wolves had given all their children nightmares and kept her awake an hour, but Robert delayed a hunt for no man. Even this early in the morning, word had already been sent to every squire and servant to prepare the horses and dogs. The steward must have found the King, wherever he had gone. He certainly hadn't shared Cersei's bed, and for that she was thankful._ I should send a token of gratitude to whichever whore he's bedded. Perhaps some moon tea, so she can rid herself of his spawn as well._

She wouldn't; Robert kept an eye on his bastards, or the ones he knew of, and he didn't tolerate threats against them. She had learnt that well enough.

She broke her fast with the children, and while she had been relieved to hear Lord Tyrion could not be roused this morning, she had been incensed to hear that Ser Jaime had not been found in his chambers. Briefly, she entertained a flare of jealousy—perhaps she'd find him in the same whorehouse Robert no doubt frequented tonight— but she knew Jaime too well. For all his faults, he was loyal.

Joffrey was excited this morning; he had been invited to hunt with Robert. Ever since Joffrey had presented the King with the kittens he'd cut out from a kitchen cat, Robert had mistrusted him at hunts, and only invited him when politically necessary. Cersei had always felt this was an extreme reaction: boys have a natural curiosity, and there wasn't much difference, to her eye, between what Joffrey had done and what Robert would no doubt do today once his men had roped him a boar of some sort. But Robert would hear nothing of it. Joffrey, thank the gods, had noticed the slight but not the reason behind it, and seemed to believe it was all a matter of proving his martial worth. He sliced through his fish with vigour.

"I expect we'll find some sort of beast hiding in the wolfswood." He patted the hilt of his sword: a gift from Jaime at his last nameday, 'Lion's Tooth'. Joffrey had taken to carrying it around whenever he could. "I think I'll set the Hound on something particular. After all, if there was one direwolf found in the forest, why not a cur to go with the bitch?" He laughed around a mouthful. "I would like to see Father's face if I pulled a carcass the size of a horse into the yard."

_So like his father; he thinks there's nothing he can't solve with a sword. At least Joffrey doesn't continually insist on it being his own_.

Cersei smiled. "I'm sure Ned Stark would find it less amusing."

"Northerners." Joffrey dismissed. "They don't have humour. I'd heard from Littlefinger that they're all tough, but half of them were crying last night in the halls, apparently."

"Don't listen to Littlefinger, my love. He tells lies as easily as some men breathe."

"Is it true, Mother? About the crying in the halls?" Myrcella asked. "There was such an awful howling last night."

"The Stark children all have young direwolves, darling," Cersei said. "Untameable beasts, of course. I expect they bit the children, but we shall find out in time."

Tommen shivered but, as Joffrey flicked his eyes to him, said nothing, and the breakfast continued on in silence. Cersei didn't entirely approve of Joffrey being cruel to his brother, as he surely was being, but Tommen, despite approaching his tenth name day, remained a weak and gentle boy, where Joffrey had always been headstrong and determined. She wanted to keep an eye on Joffrey, but stayed back from the conflict in the hopes it would give Tommen some of his brother's spirit.

Joffrey left to prepare for the hunt, and Myrcella was escorted by a septa to sew with the Stark girls. Myrcella didn't especially enjoy sewing, she had never had much of a talent, but Cersei had ensured the septas wouldn't inform her of this fact: she didn't want Myrcella discouraged. Tommen was taken away to be instructed by a septon, and Cersei took herself back to her chambers, grabbing a maidservant by the arm as she fetched her gown.

"Find where Ser Jaime has gone."

She dressed slowly, and she selected items she knew Jaime would find hard to resist. Wide bands of shining gold around her wrists, set in emerald; a long dress underneath, dusty pink, and a bodice atop it, red silk embroidered in golden starbursts. He liked the Lannister colours. He liked to rip them off her. She had the maid leave her hair loose but for a simple braid around the back; any difficult hairstyle she added would no doubt be ruined later, and she liked to leave a place with Jaime as unruffled as when she came.

By the time it was done, the maidservant had her answer: _in the training yard, your grace_, and wasn't that just like him. On an official visit like this one he was exempt from Kingsguard duty, but no doubt he claimed his duty to be the reason he had to train. She looked ruefully at the edges of her skirts and decided it to be worth the sacrifice, and made her way down to the training yard.

Even in the late morning, the courtyards of Winterfell were strangely cold and still; the only clamour came from the men in the stables, no doubt preparing the horses for the hunt. The training yards were empty but for one man, and two swords.

Jaime didn't seem to have changed his clothes from the night before; he still wore finery, all crimson and black. She had little knowledge of swordfighting, but even she could see that he was doing something strange— he had a longsword in both hands, moving them slowly, as if underwater, against a wooden block. She picked her way across the drier parts of the dirt yard, skirts gathered resolutely, and crossed into his line of sight.

"What are you doing?"

Jaime dropped the sword in his left hand as if he'd been bitten by it, and stared up at her. His face was shiny with sweat; she would have to have him wash before the afternoon.

"Your grace," he said, all courtesy, like she wouldn't notice he was ignoring her question. She narrowed her eyes.

"What are you doing?" she repeated slowly, like he was stupid. He had the decency to look embarrassed.

"Training," he answered shortly. He picked up the dropped sword and replaced it on a rack. "Ser Arthur Dayne used to dual-wield longswords, in his day."

"Fascinating," she replied. "Ned Stark was the one to slay him, was he not? You should ask him how it went for Ser Arthur, two swords against one."

Jaime racked his second sword, turning from her to do so. She could see him hunching over the rack a little, breathing hard and slow.

"Have you slept?" she asked, keeping the cool courtesy in her voice.

"A little," he said. He looked back to her and she guessed it to be a lie. His eyes were red-rimmed as if he hadn't slept in days, and his hair was stringy and wayward. _Very certainly in need of a wash first. He looks no better than some Northerner at the moment, save for the clothes._

"Perhaps you ought to get some rest this afternoon." Overly cautious wording, perhaps, for an empty courtyard, but she would take no chances in the home of Ned Stark.

"No," he said, standing up straight. The words were so sudden, it was as if they had been torn out of him. Cersei was cut so short by it she looked properly at him in surprise. His mouth was twisted a little, his face pale. She didn't recognise the emotion on his face.

"No?" she questioned.

"I will be joining the King on the hunt," Jaime said, stiff and formal.

Jaime never went on hunts. As dull-witted as he could sometimes be, even he recognised the value of every major lord leaving the castle, and used the time to Cersei's advantage. He had never even shown interest in them.

He wasn't trying to rile her up. He was _avoiding_ her. Cersei's mind went blank with fury. Jaime looked uncomfortable, as well he might, because if he carried on like this, she would give him the silent treatment for the next month and find something else to occupy her time. Lancel wasn't available, but she'd find something suitable.

"Will you now?" she said, lips lifting in a sneer. "I wish you good fortune. Joff's hoping to find a direwolf. I do so hope you find it first."

She swung on her heel and walked away, and he didn't even chase her. This was past the point of forgiveness. What did he think he would gain from her by putting up this tantrum? She offered him power and he balked: she offered him sex and he balked. What did he want? To be Arthur Dayne? It would pass: he was always the sort to pick a new idea up and drop it a week late, but wanting to keep his Kingsguard oaths was new, and frankly concerning. Was he worried someone was getting close to the truth? Had someone already gotten to him?

The more she walked, cursing the mud sticking to her shoes and skirts, the more she thought that something was very, very wrong. He had never acted like this before. This was a new and strange action on his part, to avoid her in all circumstance. This when, only a few days before, he had seemed entirely unconcerned with the world at large, and especially with the threat of Jon Arryn's murder around their necks, began to weigh on her. By the time she had returned to the Guest House, she had already thought of which people to put close to Jaime's chambers. Whatever was happening, she needed to know it, and not just when Jaime would deign to tell her.

Tyrion was breaking his fast late in the day, conversing with some Northerner, and she swept past irritably.

"Oh, sister!"

If the Northerner hadn't been in the room, she would have answered with some fairly choice words, but instead she held her tongue and smiled like a knife was held between her teeth.

"Yes, Tyrion?"

"You wouldn't have happened to see our brother around, would you?"

Cersei's smile froze on her face.

She swept from the room before she could do something she regretted.

_Tyrion and Jaime, so that was it._ The little demon had likely suspected something of Jon Arryn's death and come to a wrong conclusion. He did like to torment his family, and this would be an easy way of it. Cersei snapped her fingers as she entered her chambers and sent her maids rushing to undress her.

She would have to investigate further. Two could play at this little game.

* * *

**Jon**

* * *

The Hunter's Gate was the smallest gate in Winterfell, and led direct to the wolfswood. Normally, it wouldn't be an issue that it was so small. The hunting parties usually only contained Father, Robb, Theon and himself, with perhaps Jory or Rodrik tagging along. Today, however, leaving the castle took an eternity. The King seemed to have brought half of King's Landing with him, and the yard was full with the yapping and yowling of hunting dogs. Robert had a mastiff, a huge beige brute of a dog trained to smell for bears, that walked neatly at the legs of the King's horse.

That would resolve one question, at least. Robb and he had debated at length over breakfast what they would be hunting. King Robert, as a rule, never hunted the sigil of his house. Jon and Robb had clustered quietly around the table in Lady Catelyn's solar as Jon had said—.

"Prince Joffrey's going around the yards. Says he's going to hunt a direwolf."

Robb had winced at that. Jon hadn't blamed him.

"Suppose he wouldn't mind if we hunted ourselves a stag," Robb replied. "Or perhaps a western lion."

"Are there any western lions left?" Jon said.

Jon shrugged. "Nail a pelt on a boar, it's all the same, really."

"It is not," Robb said. "You can sew a few arms on a squid, doesn't make it a k―"

He had tailed off and stabbed at his porridge then.

They had all recited their dreams, the night before, to Father and Lady Catelyn. That would have been hard enough, but King Robert had sat in the room across from them, face stone-hard. Jon had found the telling of his dreams tough going, and he couldn't imagine the stress of it for the youngest. Arya had recited hers through deep, shuddering breaths. Bran had said his in a low, soft monotone. Rickon had whimpered and cried and finally screamed on the ground before exhausting himself enough to speak.

Jon liked to think that, like Father, he didn't believe much in signs. But this was no felled direwolf with an antler in its jaw. This had been six of them screaming as one in the night, and all telling their tales together of white walkers and krakens and―

Theon shook him. "Snow!"

"What?" he snapped, and then realised: everyone was almost through the Hunter's Gate. He kicked his horse and rode on, embarrassed he had become so distracted. Theon gave him a look of interest, then rode beside, his bright yellow cloak flashing against the grey skies. Theon had no direwolf, and Theon had no dreams, so he hadn't been in the room with them.

Just as well, really. He wouldn't have wanted to hear much of it.

It was a short ride to the wolfswood. A hundred hundred acres across, ranging to the west as far as Torrhen's Point, it was barren of most men but for the most experienced crofters and hunters, and stopped only because the Kings of Winter had cut it down around Winterfell's hot springs. The earth had swallowed the summer snows, and with every step of his horse, the ground released its smells. Damp earth, the rotting of fallen leaves, and the clean scent of sentinel needles. The seasons had not changed since Jon had been a child, and so he sensed the change more clearly than he felt most others did; the smell of autumn had crept into the forest. The King forged ahead on a blood bay mare, Father beside him on a silver palfrey, both flanked by gold and silver Kingsguard, and were swallowed into the murk entirely but for the procession of men between them and Jon.

Jon was without a dog today― Ghost was the only one that was truly his, and Father had caged the wolves until he'd decided what to do with them. Theon, however, had a hunting pack, and he was without them today.

"Where's your dogs?" Jon asked. Theon raised his bow.

"Riding bow and stable today. I'm not losing my good dogs to some bloody great bear."

Theon had never seemed much concerned when he kicked his dogs half across the yard for some small thing or another, but Jon wouldn't argue. He had no taste for violence today, and if Father and the King hadn't insisted on the hunt as a show of normality he would have stayed in bed.

He wondered if Father thought them mad.

He certainly did.

Ahead of them, lacking his own dogs as well, rode Jaime Lannister the Kingslayer, in a fine tan leather surcoat. He was dressed well, but seemed ill at ease; he darted his eyes about the canopy of trees as if searching for something. For a Lannister, he wore very little red; he was all gold this afternoon, from his shining hair to his hunting boots to the filigree lacing his sword guard. Jon had heard that, when he had stabbed King Aerys through the back, the blade of his sword had been gilded too.

The hunting party veered left, down a tiny track, and Jon urged his horse down the hillock carefully. The treeline was sparse here, and it let in a little more light; the skies were still grey with no sign of the sun, but the brooks glittered, and the wind brushed against the ferns and hawthorn. They passed by a small croft in a purley, built in grey stone. Its patches of farmland were wound with wire that a wolf's fur had caught in. The grey fur twisted in the breeze, and Jon hoped ardently he wouldn't see Prince Joffrey rushing off to hunt himself a direwolf.

Jaime seemed to be struggling to guide his horse over unfamiliar ground, and fell behind the noblemen he had been keeping pace with. Jon didn't think much of it until the Kingslayer had slowed to fall beside him, looking straight ahead as if he hadn't noticed at all.

Jon glanced up at Theon, who looked as unsettled as he felt. The Kingslayer didn't look away from the forest as he spoke.

"I hear you'll be taking the black, Snow," he said. Jon frowned, and Theon kicked his horse ahead of the two, leaving them behind. Jon urged his palfrey to speed up, and Jaime matched his pace.

"Aye," he said reluctantly.

"It's an honourable calling," Jaime added. His tone was so light, Jon doubted he meant much of it. "Truly. Eight thousand years, the Night's Watch have defended mankind. Kings live and die, houses come and go, but the Night's Watch remains. I'm sure that's how you think of it, in any case."

Today, _of all days_, Jon did not want to hear an oathbreaker's opinion of the Watch.

"It's how we all think of it," Jon snapped. "At least in the North."

Jaime huffed a breath. "How old are you, now?"

"Seventeen."

"Seventeen. I was sixteen when I was raised to the Kingsguard."

Jon and Jaime led their horses across a shallow stream, and the trees began to grow closer, the wolfswood darker, the air staler. This was a part of the wood Father, Robb and he rarely hunted in; the foliage was dense, the tracks narrow, and here the snow had not yet melted wholly. Theon urged forward, bow slung across his shoulder, and Jaime and he were almost alone in the forests. Jaime spoke on.

"I was so excited when I was named. Sixteen and a Kingsguard! I was the youngest man to join the sworn brotherhood, and at the time I didn't care for what I'd be giving up. When Gerold Hightower laid his sword on my shoulder and told me to say the words I didn't think of anything but the white cloak and the names of the men who'd come before me. Duncan the Tall, Barristan the Bold… Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning."

Jon knew them all. Father spoke little of the Sword of the Morning, but he'd heard a hundred stories of Ser Barristan, and a hundred more of Duncan.

"But the Kingsguard's for life, same as the Night's Watch, and I had plenty of time to realise what I'd given up, and why. First, no family name. It never occurred to me at the time that King Aerys and my father had fallen out, and that naming his heir to an order that takes no names was a form of punishment to my lord father. Secondly, I was sixteen. That's no age for a Kingsguard; I was barely a man, let alone of age to kill other men. I was named to become a hostage for the King to hold over my father. At the time, saying the vows felt like my choice, and by the time I realised myself to be trapped in a cage of my own devising, I already wore the white cloak."

Jon gripped the reins tight. He forced himself to stare straight ahead, but his arms were taut with the urge to lash out.

"Is that what you fear for me, Lannister?" he managed. "That I'll lose a family name?" He was being baited, and he hated it, but there was nothing he could do but react, or he was a coward. "I never had one." He kicked his horse on, catching a glimpse of Theon's yellow cloak in the distance, but Jaime matched the pace again.

"I only mean that you're too young to know what you're swearing an oath to," Jaime said. "You're young. Have you ever left the North? You ought to before swearing yourself to it. Young noblemen tour the Free Cities, from time to time. Travel south, travel east, explore the world. See what you'll miss before you choose to leave it behind." Jaime shrugged. "Me, I've never been myself. I've seen every inch of King's Landing, and little of the world beyond it."

"Travel," Jon said. "You could, if you wanted to. I've heard men say you should have traded a white cloak for a black when you broke your oath and slaughtered your king."

That had hit its mark. Jaime's jaw ticked.

"I'm giving you advice, boy," he snapped. "This isn't—"

Far ahead, a horn sounded.

"I will join the Night's Watch," Jon said. "And I'll serve with all the honour you lack, Kingslayer."

Jon kicked his horse into a gallop, and followed the hunters into the dark.


	11. The Bear

_Kingslayer_. Jaime felt the anger roiling in him, rising like water bubbling in a pot. Far ahead, a hunting horn sounded. _Kingslayer_. He'd rode north, in defiance of everyone he'd ever promised to protect, to fight for a bastard boy who had the _gall_ to impugn his honour and call him _kingslayer_? What whelp was he to bark at a lion? What _pup_?

He kicked at his horse harder than he had intended, and it whipped up into a gallop. The dismal shifting greys of the wolfswood dappled his coat with shadows, and the wind caught his hair and pulled it back from his eyes. The speed and wind weren't enough to release his fury. He'd been honest about something deeply personal to him, one of the many stories he never told, and Jon Snow had spat it back in his face. _The bastard's lucky he's met me as I am now_, he thought bitterly. _I've gone soft. Back then, I would have knocked the boy off his horse and taught him a sharp lesson._

He had washed and dressed for the hunt, but sleep had evaded him this afternoon. He rarely slept in the day, so truly it was no surprise, but he had added up the days in his head as he had lain in his quarters quietly, trying to catch an hour of rest and failing. He had last slept on the night before his trial at Winterfell. The day of the trial, the night of the dead, and now the sun had risen on the second day since he had returned to the past. He had woken, on the first morning in the past, but that sleep had been for a Jaime who no longer existed. A Jaime who would have pulled Jon from his horse, slammed his head against a tree so hard he'd crack his teeth, and remind him that the first son of Tywin Lannister should not be spoken to by bastards, let alone by the name of _kingslayer_.

He'd done everything Bran had told him to do. And what had he gotten for his troubles, mere hours after? He'd turned Cersei against him. Because he _had_, he knew her too well to think she'd let this problem lie. She wouldn't rest until she'd divined the cause, and because there was no way she'd guess the truth of it, and there could be no way of turning back, she'd imagine some slight and take revenge however she felt apt. The fear of her was something he'd learnt to handle, but not when she was this: achingly familiar, everything he'd once loved, not wracked with grief, head shaven, dreaming of revenge. Not bathed in the glow of wildfire and blood.

A glimpse of an image, something from a dream, flickered behind his eyes. Cut from neck to hips, and across her belly, shining so bright it hurt him. He grit his teeth and forced the image far, far down, deep into the undercurrent of his anger.

He caught up with the hunting party quickly enough. Jon and Theon were riding between two Stormland knights. _Hiding, more like. Cowards all four. Do they think me incapable of killing two lordlings and two green men?_ He imagined drawing and cutting all four of them down with a single swing. With his good hand back, he could do it. There was something so heartening to that, he almost wanted to prove it. His returned fingers yearned to grasp the hilt and draw and watch their surprised fucking faces as he drove the blade home.

It would look a lot like Jon had before, with a shattered sword in his hand, ice piercing his chest. The Night King had moved like a spider, so quick and precise its motion had blurred, but Jaime could remember the ease with which the creature had thrust the translucent ice through the man's chest. The position, Jaime realised now, would have cut through the plate of bone covering the heart, and yet the white walker had found no resistance.

Or perhaps it would look like Theon, crumpled in the snow, blood streaming from eyes and mouth like the face of the weirwood he died under.

Jaime rode on, past the column.

_Bran can convince the bastard himself_, he thought. _He should have known the boy wouldn't listen to reason._

The wolfswoods' grey pallor was altering in the late afternoon. The cool white of the sky painted itself a dull orange, and the shadows cast across the dense forest were longer and darker. Every branch looked like a hand, long and whispering in the cool air. Every trunk looked like one of them, the walkers, waiting.

He was exhausted. The anger had sapped the last of his reserves; he wanted to sleep, just to forget the world a moment. He couldn't kill Jon. He couldn't kill Theon. Both of them had died fighting against the very thing he had now sworn to stop. They'd lost all adulthood they'd gained, but he knew what Jon could become, if guided right. The guiding, however, seemed to be another question. He hadn't met Theon any more but briefly, and he had been, by all descriptions, not much of anything, but the last memory he had of the boy, eyeless and tongueless, crumpled in the snow, was enough to want to keep him from the same fate. He couldn't kill Robert; drunken cunt that he was, Jaime couldn't find it in him to think his death right. He'd seen the War of the Five Kings, and he'd seen what came after. Robert had, despite all of what he was, held the Seven Kingdoms together.

But Joffrey? Cersei? What was he to do with them, hope they saw the light?

He entertained the notion; Joffrey a gallant grown man, Cersei a kind-hearted woman. It was almost cruel to himself to imagine it. He rejected it out of hand until he remembered his own past, and the feel of pushing a child from a window and how easy it was and how little he'd cared, and he- wondered.

He didn't know much about madness. As a child, he'd been taught by a septon that madness was caused by a lack of prayer and humility to the Seven-who-are-One, but he had never been a devout man. It had made so much more sense to him that the world was what it was and no more; no gods, no laws, just blood and war. He had loved Cersei because that love had been inevitable. He had killed Aerys because he was insane, and madness knew no end but death. Joffrey had been mad, too, whatever sort of madness his cruelty was, and there had been no cure for it but poison.

Now Jaime's blood was weirwood sap and his war was against the white walkers, it was slightly easier to wonder at the gods, and at change. He'd been treating Cersei and Joffrey at arm's length, but they were not now what they were then. Joffrey was a young prince, not a tyrant king. Cersei had not yet ignited the Sept of Baelor. And he had not pushed Bran from the Broken Tower today.

Jaime rubbed his left hand against his right.

Perhaps, if Bran showed him the best path, guided his steps- perhaps there was a chance to help them too.

And what of Ned Stark?

The man might have aged, but Jaime remembered him as young and dour-faced, judging him from across the Great Hall. Jaime remembered how cold the Throne had been, and how uncomfortable a seat, and how the honourable Ned Stark had strode across the room, summited the staircase, and stood over him, Ice rippling in the midday sun, his grey eyes flashing with nothing more nor less than distaste.

Jaime had never once mourned Ned Stark, but having him back forced him choose if he'd let him die again, even with the risk he'd find out about he and Cersei once more. Jaime looked hard into the woods and thought about it; cutting his head off, hanging him, slicing him from neck to belly. He couldn't find the will. _I truly have gone soft._

Of Brienne, there was little to consider. Jaime had no idea where she had been in 298, and it would be best if he kept on not knowing. He wanted to see her, for a hundred reasons he wanted to seek her out and see her, but what good would dragging her into another war do? He was trying to balance several dozen lives on a knife-edge as it was. If he had to avoid her outright until he could find a way to kill the Night King, he would simply have to do it. Hopefully, if he could keep Robert alive, there would be no reason for her to fight.

He could taste the blood in their kiss, if he thought back on it.

Jaime slowly caught up with the hunters ahead: he could hear the barking of dogs and the distant throaty shouts of Robert directing his abler men to 'flank the bastard'. The King's eyes were aglow with the hunt, when Jaime caught them, and it did not abate when he made a point of joining the chase. If anything, Robert seemed the happier for having another man to command. His hounds were not so far ahead, baying for blood. Ser Meryn and Ser Boros each carried a bear spear across their backs, a great leaf-shaped blade fixed with a crosspiece, while Ned and Robb Stark had strapped on simpler spears with stouter shafts and thinner blades. Robert, Joffrey and the Hound each had their own longsword and no more, although Joffrey, one-handedly reining his horse, clutched the hilt as he rode on. He wasn't entirely apt at either, and wheeled his stallion to the side as often as he steered it true. Ned, for his part, seemed greatly unhappy to have Jaime there, but Jaime had never seen the man happy to begin with so it was quite hard to tell.

"A bear," Robert said triumphantly, "A bear, Ned, the one good thing in the North."

Jaime would have expected a man like Eddard Stark to rise to an insult like that, but Ned simply huffed in amusement and rode on.

"A big one, too," Robb noted to Jaime, as if to catch him up to speed. "He'll be about to hibernate."

Jaime wasn't sure what to say to that. The last time he'd spoken to Robb Stark, it had been in chains, defeated in their battle, with his hellhound baring its teeth an inch from his face.

"Quite," he managed.

"The summer snows have him confused," Joffrey announced. "He'll be slow with his extra weight." He said this with the sound of a small boy pointing his finger.

Jaime wondered at the fact that five years of grief could not erase his deep-set frustration at Joffrey. The boy had never been taken on hunts after he'd slaughtered a cat and its kittens; it seemed that when he finally got to go, he spent his time making comments Robert could so easily take as a slight. He wondered if Joffrey had come up with that one by himself or if Cersei had made a similar comment he'd copied, and he immediately forced the thought down from whence it came. Robert, to his credit, did not turn from the front to rise to it.

The distant barks ceased.

"They have it," Robert said, and Ser Boros blew the hunting horn again before he and Meryn plunged after the King down a yet smaller path, barely wide enough for a single horse to ride. Jaime hunted rarely, but he knew well enough what the dogs' silence meant: they had sunk their teeth in its haunches, clinging on as they were trained. They would likely die in the tussle, but Robert deemed it a fair trade for a hunt like this. The beast would be injured or slowed, and the long pursuit could begin in earnest.

As it turned out, however, Jaime was wrong. The hunt didn't take long at all.

When they found the dogs, they were silent because they were tearing into the bear's belly, teeth slick with blood and hanks of fur. The bear itself was a great thing, a mountain of bulk, ready for hibernation as Robb had predicted; but, crumpled on the ground, it seemed shrunken inside its own skin. The dogs had tried to eat its belly, but whatever had killed it had gone for the neck; it was shredded apart, and the tough cartilage of the throat had been torn in pieces.

The party slowly bunched up into the space, the men at the back catching up. Theon had his bow in hand, as if expecting to get a shot into the thing. Robert dismounted with difficulty, called and then kicked the dogs away when they would not leave their quarry, and took a spear from Boros, using the tip of the blade to pull open the wound. Jaime dropped down to look. He was no hunter, but even he could see what Robert was inspecting; whatever had downed the beast had gone through to the spine, and there were wide tooth marks gouged into the bone.

Jaime would have said no beast in Westeros could do it, but then the direwolves had returned to the North.

"What is it?" Joffrey said, eyes bright as he dismounted. Ned crossed, looked deep into the throat of the bear, and then looked away, eyes roving across the ground, as if searching for something else.

"Seven hells," Theon said from on his horse. "There's only one beast that could do that."

Joffrey grinned. "You hear that, dog? There's a direwolf."

Robert glanced askance at Ned, and Ned glanced askance at his children. Atop their horses, Robb and Jon Snow shared a look Jaime couldn't read. He was reminded uncomfortably of how they had screamed when their wolves had howled.

I_ am sure they dreamed of truth,_ Bran had said. _How very comforting. Little could ruin us all faster than the truth._

"_There_!"

The party jolted. Joffrey was pointing deep into the murk of the forest, just off the path. The Hound frowned into the shadows. Joffrey drew his sword and waved it in the air as if ready to strike, wobbling precariously on his courser.

"What did you see?" Ned asked.

"The wolf!" Joffrey insisted. "On, dog!"

And with that, sword bared, he charged into the forest. The Hound halted for a moment on his horse, then followed after.

Some of the Stormland knights shifted on their steeds as if to follow, then saw that Robert stood unmoved. Jaime looked down at the great tear in the bear's throat, then between the King and his sworn brothers. The King looked in the direction Joffrey had gone, hefting the great crossguarded spear in his hand.

"If it is a direwolf," Jaime started, prompting the King. Robert did not respond.

Robb shifted on his horse uncomfortably, staring at his father. Jon looked closely at Robert, eyes brushing contact with Jaime for several uncomfortable moments. Ned cleared his throat.

"Your Grace."

The King frowned down at the bear, and Jaime understood: Joffrey had always been a liability on hunts, and the single time he was acting like a true man on one, it was over a beast that Ned Stark not only wore on his crest but let his children keep. Finally, he handed the spear over to Meryn.

"Go on, then. Fetch the boy."

Meryn went to mount his horse, and Jaime was reminded uncomfortably of how often, and how gleefully, Trant had carried out Joffrey's demands as king. Jaime thought on Trant, and how he would as soon kill the direwolf and say it threatened their lives if Joffrey demanded.

_Keep the wolves safe_._ Had Bran meant this?_

"He won't listen to you," Jaime announced sharply, mounting and steering into the murk. "I'll bring him back."

He did not wait for questions or complaints. His horse twisted under him as if to dissent, but a sharp kick urged it on, and they descended down into the pathless forestry of the wolfswood.

The light waned down here to chinks of light, filtering through leaf and diffusing into the great mat of rotting branches and leaves beneath them. The air was thick with wet and cold, and with every breath, Jaime felt as if he was inhaling vegetation.

He found the Hound first, leading his horse on foot and cursing quietly, and without Joffrey.

"Where is he?" Jaime demanded, dismounting to lead his horse onto the same rocky outcrop. He felt the first prickling of fear. _If I was this close again, and lost him again_…

Sandor Clegane was a man of few words, who always seemed to be holding back a torrent. Here, as he looked down at Jaime, he seemed to be selecting and rejecting sentences, before finally choosing with a growl, "Lost him in the chase."

"Fuck," Jaime replied eloquently.

The way ahead was too risky to ride across, and he left his horse with Clegane, ordering him to go back to Robert and light up the damn forest if he didn't return by the time the light faded. The light was fading fast at that, and with every step he took across unfamiliar ground, the world around him grew darker. Deep in the wolfswood, everything smelt of rot and heather, and everything looked the same. Within minutes, had he not walked straight ahead, he would have had an impossible time of tracking his way back. He was no hunter. _I shouldn't have done this. I should have left it to the Starks, or to Meryn, or to some man who gives a damn about the damn wolves._

Joffrey's horse was the second thing he found. It whinnied as he approached, lying across a shallow stream a small ways to the right of his onward march. Its front leg was twisted and broken; Joffrey must have run him across the rocks and soil and not noticed the drop. The horse tried to shift away as he approached but instead screamed as its hoof turned the wrong way. Jaime could sympathise. He pulled his sword, rounded it so it could not see, and cut its straining throat. The blood flowed like a new spring to the stream, and he walked on. Joffrey could not have gone far, but he would not call out for him; the light was almost gone, and he had not forgotten the forests' name.

"Back!" called a voice, high and wavering, echoing through the forest. Jaime forgot all safety.

"Joffrey?!" He yelled, his voice bouncing back at him in the thicket. Joffrey did not reply. He turned, about and about, and then picked a direction and ran.

Trees, trees, rocks, heather, stream, trees. The light was gone, now, in this thick-grown and skyless place, and he could hear an owl cry, far above him. It was five hundred miles away, and it felt nothing so much as King's Landing, the day of Joffrey's wedding, sprinting to a boy already dying.

_He will not die again. I will not allow it. He will not die again._

He almost tripped into the clearing when he came across it. The last of the sun, deep red, stained the sky above them both. Joffrey was sprawled on the ground. He looked unhurt, but his hair askew and eyes wide with fear, and they did not move from a place behind Jaime. He turned in time to see.

It paced into the evening sunlight, slow and silent. The only sound it made were the twigs that cracked beneath its paws.

Jaime had only ever seen one before. His grandfather Tytos had kept it in a grand menagerie, and it had been old and sickly when he saw it in his youth, left in the pitch-black bowels of the Rock. You could count its ribs under the matted and dusty fur, and its eyes sagged in its sockets with age. Cersei had dared him to touch it, but even as old as it was, he hadn't liked the way it paced back and forth in its small barred cage, staring at the candles they'd brought to light their way, and he'd refused. She had scoffed and stuck her hand through the bars, brushing her fingers against its haunch, and Jaime had pulled her back before it could turn. She told him she could still feel muscle in it, as old and wasted as it was. It had been, so far as any Westron knew, the last of the Western lions, and it had died thirty years before.

This was no old and sallow beast. Its body was thick with muscle and fur, and every step it took made it ripple against the waning orange light of dusk. Its mane caught the last of the light, and the tawny fur shone like beaten gold.

The Western lion advanced on Joffrey, and Jaime had drawn his blade again before he could think. He held his sword two-handed, felt the strength in his stance. Standing on ground level, he could see the true size of the beast. Standing on four legs, it would come up to his chest, and he feared to think what it could do if standing on two legs. Worse than the size, however, was the presence; the assured quality it moved with, each part of it held ready like a spring to be uncoiled. Its great, mazy head of fur shone as bright as its eyes, green as bloodstone, cold as chips of ice. Its muzzle was stained red; its beard was dripping with gore.

It curled back its lips and bared its teeth, and the sharpest were the length of Jaime's palm. It opened wide and roared, loud as a shout, and the sound was awful. Every piece of him felt as if it had known the sound, once and long ago, and quailed to hear it. It was the sound of a monster.

His new blood pounded in his skull and his fingers curled around the hilt and he held it ready, not giving himself time to think.

"Here!" he yelled, taking three quick steps forwards.

In those three steps, the lion turned from Joffrey. Its cold green eyes seemed to look at him, like a man to a man. Jaime struck, a clean under-hew forced upwards with both hands, and the creature _sprung_, flowing like silk away from the sword. It moved as if it had always meant to move past his blade, past him, back to the edge of the clearing.

It looked back, not once at Joffrey; it stared straight at him, into him, great green eyes fixed with tiny pupils into his soul.

Then, as if a spell had broken over it, it shook itself all over, blood dripping from its chin, and the Western lion bounded into the shadows.


	12. The Kingsroad

Tyrion dreamed of dragons.

In childhood, after his uncle Gerion had laughed and his father had told him the last of the dragons had died more than a century ago, he had seen them in waking hours and in sleeping. He would glance out of the windows from the high walls of the Rock and see himself as one of the Targaryen dragonriders, flying atop Balerion, or Seasmoke, or Tessarion. He had read about every dragon, had pored over each Valyrian scroll the Westerlands held, and had learnt the glyphs just to know more. Every maester for hundreds of miles around had told all they had known about the Targaryen dragons to him, and still it had not satiated his hunger to complete the daydream. When he sailed atop the dragons, there were so many questions left unanswered.

How high could they go?_ It is not for us to question the realms of the Seven-who-are-One, young one. They could fly no higher than that, for that is certain. Shall we continue our lesson?_

How fast could they fly?_ Fast enough for war. Look to your books, Tyrion._

What did they look like? Do the pictures do them justice? _There are no men living left to tell. We have their bones. Perhaps, one day, you shall visit King Aerys and see for yourself, they hang in the Red Keep. Let us return to the numbers. Tell me, what is meant by a double-entry ledger?_

It had been a long time since his childhood, and a long time since he had let himself dream of soaring high. But now he hung in the air, as light and weightless as a bird, sitting atop Balerion the Black Dread. The dragon's body was sleek and slim, the wings as great and shining as a bird's, the scales as pliant and soft as snakeskin. It curved artfully through the air, and its call was bright as a hunting horn. Tyrion had no need to direct it; it tucked a wing in and sailed downwards, spiralling, neat as anything, until they were skimming the clouds below them, so thick Tyrion could not see what lay beneath.

Above them, there were only stars, spheres of light like molten glass. Tyrion wished to see them up close; Balerion called out and beat his wings, and they rose to meet the stars, hanging in the sky around them. He reached out to touch one, a flickering yellow, as they sailed by— he was so close…!

For the first time, Balerion turned his great snake's neck to look at Tyrion. There was no face. His head was his skull of dragonbone, sleek and polished, black as jet. The eyes— the eyes were blue, so blue they pierced him, and he fell. The clouds erupted as he dropped into them like a pebble in a lake, and he dropped, dropped, dropped; through the clouds to the other side, and above him only pale grey, the clouds parting as Balerion dived to meet him, jaws open wide to receive him, bubbling with pale fire—

He gasped, chest seizing in fear as he jolted awake.

The air was cool and the night was dark. He held his breath and listened, and there was no sound. He exhaled, long and slow.

He _wanted_ to curl up beneath the covers and go back to sleep. He _needed_ to piss.

Tyrion fumbled across the nightstand until he had a lantern lit, the horn panels throwing meagre light across the room. All that was left of the darkness were shadows, flickering in the corners. He slowly climbed out of bed, pissed in the chamberpot, climbed back. By the time he was deep beneath the goose-down and furs, the dream was hazy and indistinct. All that remained was the stab of fear in his chest, and a thought that Jaime might just have ruined dragons for him.

He glanced askance at his chest of clothes. The notes he had written two nights ago were hidden as well as they could be— which would be to say, any man determined enough to find them would have no trouble at all. He didn't like it, but there was little that could be done. By the time he returned to King's Landing, he'd have them somewhere less obvious. Ideally, he would commit them to memory and burn them, but there was so much he wasn't yet sure he understood, let alone knew well enough to memorise.

He lay back and closed his eyes, long enough to act as if he'd given sleep a chance, and then dragged himself out of bed again, crossed the room, and unlocked the chest.

This chest had been one of many; he rarely packed light. He had brought more clothes than he'd require and more books than he'd read in a year, but it was easy enough to overpack his chests when he didn't have to carry them.

He'd carried the necessities in this smaller one, and now, the next six years of Westerosi history with it.

He'd folded them into a thick square, small enough to tuck into a gap beneath the leather panelling and the outer layer of timber. The sheets were crumpled, some paper, some parchment. He'd written all over Ayrmidion's Engines of War when he'd finally run out, scrawling notes beneath the diagrams and inbetween the unspeakably old Valyrian glyphs. He carried the papers across the room as if they could burst aflame at the slightest touch. He laid them out on the bed before he climbed up after them, nestled them among the furs cautiously, and squinted at them in the lantern light.

He'd cramped writing into every inch of unwritten surface. The notes were truncated in places, shortened where he was familiar with his own abbreviations, but more often than not he had seen good reason to write it exactly how Jaime had told it.

_—Robert too drunk to see the boar that gored him I heard || Cersei of course using Lancel to get him drunk, who else would it have been? || No, I didn't hear much after I was tied to a post for half a year || Incidentally I do believe it's time to tell you the parts of this that were your fault dear brother_

He would be a fool to believe it all out of hand. A day of rest had given Tyrion time to think, and time to come up with excuses. If there were diseases that turned men's flesh to stone, there was every chance a pox could cool a man's blood and make it shine bright and sticky as sap. As for how Jaime could catch such a pox, well— he had no way of knowing what his dear siblings got up to in their own time.

And Jaime _had_ been acting strange. He had gone out on the hunt with Robert yesterday, which wasn't precisely his brother's favourite activity to begin with, and the party had returned carrying a mauled bear carcass, an unsettled Robert, and Joffrey on the back of Jaime's horse, looking ashen and unwell. Jaime had helped Joffrey down, Joffrey had flung himself into Cersei's arms, and Cersei had stared at Jaime like-

Well. Tyrion wouldn't pretend to understand what it had meant, but he knew at least that she had been furious, and was in some way blaming Jaime for the matter. Jaime, for his part, had handed his horse's reins to the stable boy and walked away without a word. He hadn't emerged for supper, and Tyrion had knocked on his door later to no response; a servant later told him his brother had gone on a walk, and had declined to say to her where or if he'd be coming back soon. Joffrey spent all of yesterday evening insisting to anyone who'd listen that it had been a western lion, trying to eat him. It was a strange lie even for Joffrey, and Cersei had covered for it by insisting the prince must have seen some ravening direwolf, perhaps one of the Stark boys'. This suggestion was met with a stormier expression than he'd ever seen on Robert's face, and Cersei had taken Joffrey from the hall under the pretense of seeing to one of his 'wounds'.

He scanned across another note, cramped beneath ancient Valyrian draftsmanship of a trebuchet.

_—Father died, soon after that, and you left for Essos || It doesn't much matter why, you'll want to save the space for Daenerys Targaryen_

There were so many notes after that he'd had to make his words smaller and smaller, pushed into ever-tighter spaces on the sheets.

_—I never learned how she did, but there were rumours of blood magic. Used to think they were all lies but now I'm not so certain. You never told me otherwise._

_—I do, yes. Drogon, Viserion, Rhaegal._

_—No, the pictures never got them right. They were monsters._

_—Faster than sin._

_—There was never any chance. In life or in death they were the greatest weapon on the field. Bronn shot it as close as any man could have and it_

_—So strange to hear you ask. Bronn was perhaps the finest sellsword in Westeros and should I ever meet him again I'm going to fight him with my good hand || Perhaps break a few of his teeth_

_—He took more than his fair share of my money and my pride, all I ask is one good fight and to watch him lose it || Now did you want to hear about the dragons or not_

Like a balding man brushing his hair over the thinning spots, Tyrion could see the gaps in Jaime's narrative. His brother had quickly forged past moments of a six-year history that were clearly of great importance. He hadn't explained why Tyrion had been arrested on the ride south from Winterfell. He had brushed over his own imprisonment just as quickly, just to mention that he'd lost to the Stark boy in battle and lost a hand on the way back home. His brother, of all people, couldn't have been indifferent to losing his sword hand.

To add to the insanity, Father's death had barely warranted a mention. _Tywin Lannister!_ Their father scarcely entering into the conversation was such a glaring omission it almost beggared belief Jaime had thought he'd get away with it. And then, thrown out within the madness, he had turned from the Lannister family to ally with the Targaryens. Of all houses, the Targaryens. Jaime clearly knew the man that shot Daenerys' dragon, so had Jaime been on the opposing side? Where did the truth lie in that?

In turn, what Jaime admitted to not knowing could fill another sheaf of pages. He had no idea what had happened to Jon Arryn, although, to Tyrion's surprise, he was certain that Cersei had served no part in it. He had no idea what Ned Stark had known or not known about his and Cersei's little indiscretion, just that Joffrey had cut the Stark's head off for it. He was none the wiser about what Lord Baelish had done in all these years, nor Lord Varys, and trying to wring any understanding of the Westerosi political situation from his brother was no more reliable than asking a stableboy. Jaime, it seems, had never taken much interest in the goings on of the Red Keep, and indeed seemed to have spent his time in these apparent six years actively avoiding anything interesting that had happened.

_And yet, and yet._ Something held him back from proclaiming it all madness. It almost contributed to a sort of truth. Jaime's tale was too convoluted to be his; Tyrion loved his brother, but he had too linear a mind to make these sorts of leaps. In a story of Jaime's imagination, a reveal of he and Cersei's acts would no doubt involve some sort of trial by combat for his honour against Ned or Robert or even both. A story where he's captured, maimed, divested of his sword hand and indifferent to the various territory changes and political shifts; it was almost too believable not to be true. Save the ice dragons and dead men, it could almost feel real. Something in Tyrion told him that the truth couldn't possibly be anything but what it was; magic, pulling Jaime like a kite in the winds from one time to another. It had to be true.

It felt _real_.

The parchment under his fingers creaked.

On one subject, Jaime had had a lot to say, and it had never been one he'd focused on in any depth before: his children. It was the first time Tyrion had even heard Jaime admit it.

About Joffrey, he'd had much to talk of. Tyrion had presumed for years that the boy would make a poor king, but it was hard to hear the stories, and especially coming from Jaime, who had done his level best to ignore the boy's cruelties entirely. Tale after tale of the acts of a boy-king-tyrant filled the pages, more than some levelled at Tyrion, which he unfortunately found unsurprising. Jaime had twisted his mouth in a bitter smile when he'd said the last of it.

_—Olenna Tyrell in the end || Poisoned his wine || Framed the cupbearer || I won't lie and say he was a good king, or even a good boy, but he died in pain and he shouldn't have. I was on guard that day, it had been my responsibility. Olenna only told me after I granted her a death in peace_

_—Olenna? Yes, I did, but not for a couple years || I need to circle back_

Myrcella took over half an hour to explain, and in halting, stilted sentences Tyrion had had to cross out and clarify several times over to understand.

_—Betrothed to the Martell prince Tristane || I went to Dorne for her and came back with || Well I'll tell you about the journey first, start at the start_

So much about Jaime and Bronn, so much about Oberyn Martell's bastard daughters. Almost nothing at all about Myrcella until the end, the very end, and it had rushed from him as a dam might break.

_—She knew in the end || She told me she'd known for a long time_

_—What do you think? Cersei and I. She told me_

_—Well it doesn't matter much what she told me_

_—She died in my arms._

_—Poison again. It was a quieter death than Joffrey's._

_—Cersei told me after that a witch promised her children would all die before her. || After all this, perhaps she was right._

Tommen's death was a single line in the margin of a page that encompassed a catastrophic change in Westerosi history and his own life. He entirely ignored all requests for clarification on any of its points.

—_He threw himself from the Red Keep. I wasn't there at the time. Cersei took the Iron Throne, and I went north._

'Cersei took the Iron Throne.' Tyrion brushed a thumb over the letters, felt the slight raise of the ink on the parchment. Cersei, their sister, the Queen of Westeros, of all impossible things, and yet Jaime had, as far as could be read, abandoned her immediately.

And he the hand to Daenerys Targaryen. None of it made _sense_. Tyrion had no love for the Targaryens: he might have been young when Aerys had died, but he'd heard enough to make him glad his brother had ended that dynasty for good. What would possess him to back them, and the daughter, not even the son?

And Jaime on the opposing side? Where did that put them now?

Jaime had pushed on to describe dragons and white walkers no matter what Tyrion asked, insisting it wasn't important in comparison to the true threat. It was so baldly an avoidance Tyrion had almost stopped Jaime from telling him about ice dragons.

He hadn't, of course. Childhood curiosity won out, and Jaime told him of the first and apparently last battle against the dead.

_―In Winterfell. It wasn't my work, but it was well-done. Palisades built, moats dug, archers lining the had even lined the walls with dragonglass._

_—They broke it in less than ten minutes. There could have been twenty thousand more of us and it would have meant nothing_

_―No, not like that. Most didn't seem to have mind enough for a siege._

_—They piled themselves up like a wall and charged us || Just climbing over each other, like rats ||Perhaps a hundred thousand. Perhaps more. || Daenerys torched the closest of the bastards and you could see them stretching, on and on and on || They filled every inch of ground to the horizon. That alone would have destroyed us._

_—It knocked down the walls || Landed in the Great Hall, the one where you ate yesterday. It just landed in it like the roof had never been there, and then it crushed Arya in its mouth. You could see her arm sticking out. || Downed the other dragons in minutes || It screamed the whole time. || Its wings were torn. Its throat was half-open. It had blue eyes then, just like the rest of them || It sounded like death._

_―You were down in the crypts._

_―Yes._

_―No deaths are dignified._

_—No, not exactly._

_—The dead stood still, and he walked in._

_—Jon Snow the Stark bastard led the North by then. When he came to King's Landing to convince us of the threat, he called it the Night King._

_—I'm not sure it was a dead man. I think the dead moved on his command._

_—His flesh was ice, his eyes were ice. Jon charged him. He had told us fire could kill wights, dragonglass and Valyrian steel the white walkers, but all three failed to stop it. Jon was run through. We ran to the weirwood._

_—Bran has a connection with the Night King; not that he ever explained it to us, but he told us the Night King would target him and he spoke true. || He_

_—I'm not sure. He used blood._

_—A lot of people's blood._

_—I woke up this morning, and I was here again._

_—No. Not a dream, not some woods witch vision. I was there, and I remember it, every part._

_—Bran spoke to me in the weirwood._

_—If I knew how, would I be trying to drink so much? || He was in the weirwood, and he spoke to me, and told me to find a man in the crowd and told me his name, and he was right. It might not prove it to you, but it proved it all to me._

_—The wildling king || Mance Rayder._

_—A hundred thousand wildlings need to come south of the wall by the end of the year if we have any chance of stopping the Night King. Those wildlings will become soldiers in his army if we do not._

_—Then we can kill Mance and herd them all back north when the threat is dealt with. It's no matter to me what we do with them after. What guarantee do we have there is an after?_

Tyrion was cooling down out of the covers. He placed down the parchment, unbent his fingers from where he'd been gripping the pages tight enough to make them shake, and cupped them against his mouth, blowing warm air in, feeling his hands tremble. He could see traces of steam escape from between his palms, catching the light of his lantern and a light from the window.

He frowned at the window. A thin, yellow light was flickering from left to right. Tyrion slowly shuffled across the bed to the lantern on the side table, quietly unlatched the panels, and blew it out. The room went dark, and the firelight from the window brightened.

He slid from the bed as slowly as possible, treading the cool flags of stone.

_Thud_.

The sound from outside made him startle.

_Thud_.

And again. He pulled himself up onto the sill set against the window, keeping himself back and to the side of the glass.

The courtyard was ill-lit by a few lanterns, guttering in the northern wind. Still, it was just enough to see the glint of the firelight against a light tan jacket; an arm moving with a tourney sword in its hand, swinging against a straw bundle. The lanterns flickered with the winds, and made it hard to see much more than a dark shape in darkness. As his eyes got used to the dark, he could pick out with certainty his brother's silhouette, practising forms in the dead of night.

Something about it set Tyrion on edge.

It ought not to. His brother was a swordsman practising at his sword; it shouldn't be so strange. Perhaps he just couldn't sleep.

_But then,_ Tyrion thought, _when had Jaime last slept?_ Certainly not the night before, they had been together for all of that. And he had joined the hunt all day yesterday, and left for wherever he had gone all evening.

Unless Tyrion was wrong, Jaime should have been coming on for two full days without any sleep at all.

And yet Jaime went on. Form after form, swing after swing, and it should have seemed normal, even with the hour, even with everything else that had been wrong with the last two days. A sleepless brother wasn't something to fear.

And yet, and yet, and yet. He could feel the hairs rise on his arms, and a rush of blood from his face, and an unwillingness to look away. Tyrion watched until his legs had numbed against the hard, cold sill; he had to stand and move them painfully, and when he considered clambering back up and looking down upon the courtyard again, something in him chilled. It was like a little boy's fear of looking through a window at night, for fear of―

_Well. I suppose I can't say the Others anymore._

He could hear the dull thud of wooden sword to straw, and he retreated to his bed. It was likely no more than his brother's insomnia, the same as his own, that was driving them both mad tonight. He doubted he could get back to sleep, but he could pile the covers about his head and read the notes again and again until they made sense. He shoved the furs and featherdown covers until they made a place he could sit and read, and he settled back in them, getting comfortable, and then decided he'd let his eyes rest for just a moment.

He was horrified to wake up only an eyeblink later to a dim-lit sky, a knock at the door, and his head nestled in the most dangerous papers he could ever leave around idly. He jammed them all under the furs on his bed, wincing as he heard one tear a little, and took his time about getting to the door.

A servant, one of the young girls, and not one of his. He frowned at her.

"Apologies, m'lord," she said, but did not drop to a curtsey. Her voice was all North. "Your brother requests you downstairs."

_The nightmare of my waking hours as well. Can the man not let me rest?_

"Tell him I'll be down at a reasonable hour," he says, glancing out at a thin milkglass window in the corridor and the barely dawning sunlight behind it.

"Pardon, m'lord," she insisted, "But he said you must be down immediately."

Tyrion regretted having a brother.

"I'll be down," he said, and shut the door in her face.

He turned around to see his trunk, lid opened wide, panelling askew. He looked between it and the door; there was no way of telling if he'd opened the door wide enough to see the trunk.

He sighed. He hadn't time to find a better place. He dressed quickly in the warmest clothes he had, and gently uncovered the pages from beneath the covers.

He had torn a page of Ayrmidion's Engines of War; a beautiful siege engine he had strewn with notes was now also crumpled and torn.

He smoothed it out against the bedcovers the best he could; he laid each page of Westeros' future on top of each other, one by one, and folded them into a thick square by the same lines he had folded them the night before. Then he tucked the whole thing into his shirt, and buttoned up his doublet on top. The pages rustled up against his chest. He ran a hand down his doublet; the thick wool padding did not betray where they were.

The closest place to safety. He walked from his room to the courtyard, and the whole way he could feel the papers shift minimally beneath his shirt, slowly sinking to cover his heart and shift uncomfortably as it beated.

Northerners, it seemed, rose with the sun. The courtyard was cold with the last of the night's chill air, but by the time Tyrion had walked down, the sun cresting the horizon, it was already full of people, and crying children, and the scent of horse and boiled leather. The Lady Catelyn marched as fierce as a soldier from place to place, wrapped in a fur, directing each cart and object to its proper place in the long, long line of wagons snaking through Winterfell's walls, ready to leave. As he crossed the courtyard, he seemed to get in the way of every man and woman with something heavy in their hands, and heard the cavalcade of cut-off curses as they stopped themselves from swearing blind at the brother of the Queen. Small pleasures had to be taken this morning, and so he took that one, making sure he would hold up both them and his thrice-damned brother on the way to the stables.

He wasn't hard to find in his Kingsguard armour; his bright cloak and shining metal soaked in every bit of the morning sun. Jaime's white horse was saddled and bitted, and he sat upon it, but a simple-looking, freakishly tall stableboy stood near him, holding Tyrion's palfrey. It too was saddled and bitted, but it, unlike Jaime's, was weighed down with a pack saddle and bags; enough to make a long journey without stopping.

"My horse is travelling north," Tyrion said. "I had always heard the Dornish breed were an independent lot."

"Get on the horse," Jaime said impatiently, riding for the gate. Tyrion frowned after him, and called for a mounting block. By the time he had ridden to the edge of Wintertown, a light snow had begun to fall, snowflakes melting in his hair and wetting his scalp. He was well-dressed for the ride, but Northern winds were colder than he had expected; the wind seemed to cut through the wool of his clothes and the thin shadowcat lining of his scarlet cloak.

The fields of Winterfell were empty but for the courtiers warming their horses and clasping their hands. The early morning fogged his breath and chilled his nose; Tyrion pressed the back of a glove against it to warm it up, and remembered how Jaime had said it was cut in half in battle. How would that look? Gruesome, presumably. Some men carried scars with a somewhat rugged charm, but he doubted he'd be among those ranks.

Jaime's horse was as white and shining as his cape, well-cleaned of the mud from yesterday's hunt, and it stamped at the dew-glittering glass impatiently. Jaime seemed more like himself this morning. The anxious hand-wringing was gone, the eyes flickering from place to place had calmed. However, where he expected to see Jaime's look of general indifference and amusement to his surroundings, Tyrion could only see weariness.

"Did you sleep well?" Tyrion asked. Jaime blinked over, and Tyrion watched with surprise as his brother pulled on a perfect mask of fresh-faced neutrality: almost entirely like the Jaime he expected to see.

"Perfectly, with those hounds silent," Jaime replied. "Which brings us to our ride. Please do look to the forests as we go, our sister will never forgive us if we do not find the creature that put our nephew in such danger."

Jaime set off in entirely the opposite direction to the wolfswood, and Tyrion rode beside. They went along quietly for as far as it took to be distant from the ears of the merchants and courtiers that bustled past the entrance.

Jaime had lied about how he had slept, then. Moreover, had Tyrion not known for sure he was lying, he might never had known at all.

_How very interesting._

"And what was it?" Tyrion asked then.

"A Western lion," Jaime said grimly. "A big bastard of a Western lion. I saw it as well as he did."

Tyrion had had quite enough of Winterfell. He grasped for normalcy.

"Are you sure you didn't see a bear? Perhaps a wolf? A rather large fox?"

"I could have reached out my hand and touched it, Tyrion," Jaime replied. "It was a lion, I'm not a fool."

"Oh, is that how you lost it last time?"

Jaime's eyebrows tipped up, as if he was deciding whether or not to take the bait. Jaime would have always taken the bait before. Tyrion was uncomfortably reminded again that this Jaime, the one that sat ill at ease in his Kingsguard armour and held his arm like a crippled man when he forgot himself, could be six years away from any Jaime he'd ever known.

And a liar, he reminded himself. About how much, hard to say.

Jaime looked across the barren fields of the North, snow clinging to his hair, and continued on. "It looked at me, right at me, and fled. It could have killed me without trying."

"So then why didn't it?"

"Another question I'll ask myself at night," Jaime said with a shrug. You must have a lot of questions to keep you up that late, Tyrion thought of saying, and then discarded it.

"Perhaps you should ask your boy in the trees."

"Ah, yes. About that. You're going to the Wall."

"Am I?" Tyrion asked with a raised eyebrow. "I do have interesting notions."

"He doesn't want Jon Snow taking the black," Jaime said. As they followed the curtain walls of Winterfell in a slow circle, Tyrion saw the dark fringed caps of the sentinel trees in the godswood, poking up from the masonry. High above, from a watchtower window, a guard watched them ride.

"And might I ask your Bran what business it is of mine that Ned Stark's bastard avoids celibacy?"

"This isn't him," Jaime said. "He asked me to do it first―"

Tyrion could guess at the problem already. Jaime had never had patience for children. "―And your famous powers of persuasion and charm weren't enough to do the trick?"

This time, Jaime did take the bait, and swung halfway around on his horse to glare. "The bastard's barely past a boy," he said with venom. "And every inch his father already. He wouldn't hear a word from me."

And so your poor brother has to freeze his balls off in the far north, trying to tell a teenage boy what to do."

Jaime shrugged. "You liked the Wall last time."

"I recall something about being arrested on the way down last time."

Jaime tapped the fingers of his right hand thoughtfully against his leg. Tyrion noticed he was riding one-handed, and only with his left.

"I don't think," he said slowly, "There's a reason for it to happen now."

"You don't _think_?"

Tyrion didn't like this at _all_. Jaime had Westerosi politics in one hand at this moment, and seemed determined he had already altered the course. Tyrion loved his brother, truly, but not enough to trust him on making far-reaching diplomatic decisions alone.

"I've warned you, haven't I?" Jaime said. Dark amusement crept into his voice; it was more reassuringly Jaime than anything Tyrion had seen him do in the last few days of insanity. "Just don't get arrested this time."

"Don't get your hand cut off," Tyrion replied, and his brother's face darkened.

"I'll try," he said, his right hand joining the reins and gripping them tighter than necessary. They rode on in silence.

The snowfall had not thickened, but it was holding for far longer than any of the summer snows he had encountered on the ride up. Winterfell was surrounded to the west by forest, but in all other directions the land was hilly and largely barren, and morning mist had settled in the valleys and dips. The light breezes swirled the snow and kicked up the mists in thin eddies. The flakes were melting as they hit the earth, but they were settling against the uneven walls of Winterfell, flowing up against the slight camber of the wall and sticking against the moss and lichen. Jaime broke the silence, his words turning to thin puffs of white as he spoke.

"Not one of them is to die," Jaime said. "Not Robert, not Stark, not Joffrey, not a single one."

Tyrion could have fallen from his horse at a statement like that. He let the words hang while he thought of what to say.

"If what you say is true," Tyrion started, slow and quiet, "You must appreciate the danger we're all in. And not only from your unkillable Night King; if Stark got too close last time, what's to stop the same thing happening but his death?"

"And what's to stop the Night King?" Jaime said. "If one man dies, we lose a soldier and they gain one. If one man dies, we have no way of knowing if Westeros stays together. We cannot afford losses of anyone in power, no matter the cost. We have a chance to fix this."

_We have a chance to fix this._ For his children? For Westeros? For him? Where did Jaime's motivations lie?

Jaime dropped from his horse to inspect the creature's shoes, lifting each leg with a surprising care. Jaime had never much cared for any horses before; he always ran them hard and abandoned them wherever he found a fresh one.

Tyrion couldn't let him carry on to King's Landing with a strategy as like to get them all killed as not.

"You can't hold a country together without bloodshed." _Some men could, but when you just so happen to sire bastard children to your twin sister and the wife of the King, certain methods become unavailable._

Jaime wandered in a slow circle, then leant back against the great curtain wall of Winterfell. The golden scales of Jaime's armour clinked against the lichen-blotted stone. He leant his head back, eyes tightly closed and lips thinned into a line. The snowflakes in his hair were starting to build up; their shimmering made his golden hair seem silver.

"I'm going to _fix it_, Tyrion."

"And I appreciate your enthusiasm, but with the best will, you've never been…"

Tyrion gestured in the air a little, searching for the words.

"The sort for this."

"And what sort is that?" Jaime asked, opening his eyes to glare. "I'm not the man you knew. I've spent years learning how to command an army with one hand and half of Westeros at my throat, and now I have two hands and half a chance to keep them. I intend to hold together this country as long as I can, and if you don't help me, I'll do it myself."

Tyrion could see a lost cause of an argument when he saw one, and Jaime, in one sense, was right. He wasn't the man Tyrion had known. He was something new now, a stranger wearing his older brother's skin, a man who saw ghosts and lions and white walkers each way he turned, a man who had weirwood sap for blood.

_A man who lies about the slightest thing. And I'm going to ride on his orders?_

And yet, what could he do? Lie? Refuse?

"I see no wolves," he said. "We should return to the gates."

He turned and rode. Above, he heard a bird cry; he glanced up to see a raven, scroll tied to its leg, swooping from the walls of Winterfell and flying southeast. Tyrion watched it fly, and as he did, he imagined it a dragon and himself atop it, flying far away from the madness, back to the relative calm of Lannisport, back where men did not commune with trees and twist time about like a ribbon tied in bows.

At the gates of Wintertown, a crowd had formed. Little love was clearly lost to see the Lannisters or Baratheons leave the North, but the sheer number of Starks travelling south seemed almost absurd, and the atmosphere was solemn among the smallfolk, not celebratory. Ned Stark rode just behind Robert, looking for all the world as if he were travelling to some swamp in the Riverlands, not King's Landing; oiled, crumpled riding leathers and a wool coat that looked like it had seen better days, or even better centuries.

So many Stark children followed the procession they almost swamped Joffrey, who was urging on the procession by pushing his horse up close to the back of Ned's. His nephew seemed keen to be rid of the North, or perhaps the Northern children following. Sansa Stark, the younger girl Arya, and Bran, who Tyrion did his level best to keep from looking at. This Bran wasn't the one talking to Jaime through the trees, but as far as Tyrion was concerned, until he knew exactly what those trees were doing he couldn't take even a small boy for granted anymore.

_Which will make handling Littlefinger and Varys such a joy. If they knew about those pages, if they so much as suspected…_

He had a long way north yet to go, and yet he felt cold enough already for a lifetime.

Tyrion saw a glimpse of movement in his periphery, and Each Stark was bringing a piece of the North with them. Even after the strange nighttime howling, every child had been permitted their direwolf, keeping pace with the horse. Tyrion could have sworn they had grown in the days since his arrival. Arya's wolf was the size of any large hunting hound, Bran's had the oversized ears and paws of a puppy despite its already significant bulk, and Sansa's—

Snuffed at the air, and swung its head around to look.

Its eyes were yellow as egg yolk; they made it easy to see just how small and dark its pupils were, and how fixed they were on Jaime. It growled at them, baring its canines, and the other wolves plucked up their heads to follow, and low hums started in their throats, losing pace with the horses, poising to strike. Jaime brushed his hand against his sword, Tyrion's horse started to shift beneath him, and Sansa twisted around where she rode side-saddle.

"No, Lady," she chastised, and that was apparently that. The direwolf huffed and returned to following his owner's horse, and its siblings followed.

Tyrion frowned over at Jaime, and Jaime frowned long and hard at the Starks, retreating slowly from Winterfell with their monsters trotting obediently beside.

"Have you been kicking them in your spare time?" He murmured to Jaime. Jaime shrugged one shoulder.

"They're wild animals," Jaime said quietly. "I don't like them coming south with me."

"What were they doing last time?"

"Dying, mostly." Jaime looked over at Tyrion, his eyes searching. "Do I have your agreement to go north?"

Tyrion was silent for a moment. He watched the Stark children and the bastard speak. Jon said something, then Bran, then Arya. Sansa was quiet a long moment, then said something too. The white direwolf shook itself as if to rid itself from the snow, Jon said something more, and then rode across to Ned Stark. Robert had left the front of the party, including Cersei's wheelhouse, to go speak to the boy. Tyrion wondered what they all had to say to the boy that he seemed bound to follow north.

"To my great despair," Tyrion said, "I believe you. And what comes with believing you, sadly, is having to follow your child in the tree. So yes, Jaime. I'll go north, persuade the boy, visit some wildling whores, piss off the edge of the world. But I'm coming back to King's Landing the second he's convinced, and until then, I want you to promise me you won't do a thing to try and influence Robert, Cersei or anyone else."

"If you'd seen what I had—"

"_Nothing_. Not a thing, I want to hear you say it, and then I'll do as you ask."

Jaime glared to the wolfswood, then to Tyrion, and then heaved a sigh, as if all of him was collapsing inwards under great weight.

"_Fine_. I'll do as I did; I'll stand at Robert's door and listen to him fuck serving girls until he or I keel over."

"That's the spirit."

The Night's Watch, Jon in their midst, peeled away from the party. Ned and Robert led their children to the front of the riders. Benjen glanced over at Tyrion, and it seemed the parting had come all too soon for Jaime's liking.

"Is there anything more you wish to know?" he said, looking anxiously to the riders turning to ride the Kingsroad north.

_Much and more, brother._ He wanted to know the truth of what Jaime had hidden about his past. He wanted to know why he had lied about such a trivial thing as sleep. Tyrion wanted to know what had been done with his blood, what he meant by the Stark boy speaking to him through trees, why he no longer trusted Cersei. Tyrion wanted to know what Bran wanted by Jon, and why he had to spend the next month of his life travelling to the edges of the civilised world on the boy's mission. He wondered what had happened to the Starks, in this lifetime and the last.

But Jaime either didn't know the answers or wouldn't say. Tyrion didn't recognise the man he was now well enough to say what he'd do if questioned. The safest option, until he had found more out, was silence.

"If you happen to recall the weather," Tyrion said, "It would be nice to know."

Jaime turned to him with a look Tyrion couldn't place. He looked at him for a moment, up and down, as if trying to commit him to memory, and Tyrion shivered with more than the cold.

"Winter," Jaime said. "Stay safe, little brother."

He kicked his horse ahead, and then to a gallop, white cloak streaming behind him as he rode to the front of Robert's procession south.

"Until we meet again," Tyrion replied to the empty air Jaime had been, tongue heavy in his mouth. Papers rustled against his chest.

He bunched the reins up in his hands and rode north.


	13. Wood and Steel

**ARYA**

"Bang!"

Bran looked back too late; she had already bounced from the low and crumbling wall of Moat Cailin, crashing into him and sending them sprawling to the ground. Bran didn't make any sound, just rolled and glared at her; he had probably fallen from so many walls that he was used to it. Arya laughed, rubbing at the knee she'd skinned in the drop, and sat up. A wolf with yellow-green eyes snarled over her, teeth bared, but she wasn't afraid.

"_Bang?_" Bran asked. "Back, Symeon."

Symeon settled back on his haunches, and Arya jumped up, offering Bran a hand. He took it, standing and dusting himself down. Bran settled a hand between Symeon's ears, fingers sinking into the fur like a thick carpet. The direwolf's tail thumped against the damp earth, rustling a leaf.

"Like the hammer of the gods story," Arya said. "That happened here, you know. Old Nan told me once."

She climbed back up onto the wall; it was black pitted stone, and every bit of it was covered in either soft green or slimy ghostskin moss. Uncertain footing, so she kept her arms out wide like Bran did. "That's the Childrens' Tower. Old Nan said they built the tower, the Children, and when it was done, they went—"

Arya held both of her hands to the sky, and slammed them down like slapping a table. She wobbled a little on the wall.

"Bang! And they smashed the Neck, and the water filled it up, and that's why it's all slimy here and full of lizard-lions and mudmen."

Bran, still not climbing _anything_, pretended to wobble around like Arya was. "You're remembering it all wrong! It's the hammer of the _waters_ the Children called on. And the _gods_ were the ones that destroyed the Neck, not the Children."

Arya frowned over at the Childrens' Tower. The lunchtime sun and morning rains made Moat Cailin glitter; all the slimy moss and the dark green water-weeds and rain-slick walls, shining like stones polished by the sea.

The wooden fortress had collapsed hundreds of years ago, and Arya couldn't even see a shred of it left. Rotted by the sins committed on it, or so Old Nan had said. The towers, though, were built by the Children in that dark stone. The bottom of it was sunk into the bogs, but they still stuck out of the waters. The Drunkard's Tower was almost all gone, and the bits that were still there were all at a lean like it was about to fall over. The Gatehouse Tower was intact, and it stood up straight and you could probably live in it, but it was dull and boxy. Darker stone, but like any other tower Arya had seen.

The Childrens' Tower was something different. She wanted to stare at it. It was long and thin. It looked like some huge creature had taken a bite from the top, then gnawed at it 'til it was sharp as a sword. All the towers were covered in moss, but the only moss that ate at the Childrens' Tower was ghostskin, long grey fingers stretching into the mortar.

"You probably don't remember it right anyway," Arya said to Bran finally. "You didn't even get the Star-Eyes one right."

Bran had gotten more and more annoyed by this every day.

"It's not _about_ the-"

"'Symeon Star-Eyes, the most famous knight in the age of _myeh myeh myeh_'," Arya mocked, jumping down from the wall on the other side. She rubbed her hands in the thick plush of Nymeria's neck, and patted her long snout, before crossing behind a ruined staircase sunk in the earth. She emerged from the other side holding thumb and forefinger in a circle over each eye. "The most famous _blind_ knight of all time? Who had _star-sapphires_ for eyeballs?"

Bran glared.

"His eyes don't _have_ to be blue," Bran said, hand unmoving from Symeon's head. The wolf's eyes were yellower in the sun, but seemed to go green in the dark; he had grown much slower than Lady or Nymeria, and his fur was patterned with dark and pale browns.

Nymeria, on the other hand, was grey all over. Her body was grey, her head was capped with a darker grey still, and even her eyes were kind of a grey-brown. She was paler than Grey Wind, too, who was dark as a smudge of soot. "You'll lose her in a fog," Robb had laughed when he'd handed her the pup.

"You've been boring all _week_," Arya complained, rushing up the smashed staircase and sitting herself down at the top. Nymeria barked and followed, poking her large long head over the edge. Arya swung her legs over the edge and kicked them at Bran; they were too high up to get his head, but they sailed just above. "Dare you to climb the Childrens' Tower."

Bran shook his head. "It's wet from the rain," he said. "Next time."

"Who knows when we'll ever be back? Go on!"

Bran looked up at the towers, and Arya looked over too. The sun was just starting to pass behind the Gatehouse Tower; a bird flapped past it like a little blink of the sun's eye. A long shadow was starting to cast across the sparkling bog; she could see a gentle ripple near what could be either a log or a lizard-lion, just emerging from beneath a pile of water-weed.

"There you are!"

Jory Cassel walked over to them from the trees, a frown on his face.

"What did I say to you both about walking off?"

Arya groaned, kicking her legs in the air.

"It's nice here," she said. "It's not going to be near as nice back with that wheelhouse _rattling_ all the time." She picked up a stone and threw it as far as she could into the water. It made a satisfying _plop_ into the bog.

"There's been talk of people disappearing in the Neck, the last few days," Jory said. "It's not safe for young lords and ladies to go off alone."

"We have Nymeria with us, Jory, _and_ Symeon," Arya said. Jory eyed the direwolves thoughtfully.

"Fearsome beasts when they'll be grown," Jory replied, "But they're not grown, and neither are you. Come on now; don't want to keep the King waiting."

"The King can wait," Arya tried, but Jory looked like he'd pick her up and carry her back to the Kingsroad if she complained again, so she sighed long and loud and went back down the stairs instead. She slid on the last step, covered in ghostskin and slime, and landed back on her bum. Bran huffed out a little laugh just like his wolf. Jory smiled a bit and tried to help her up; she batted his hands away and used Nymeria's big neck to pull herself up.

"This whole place is falling down," Jory said. "Best not to climb it, my lady."

"I was doing fine 'til you turned up," she said. Jory just shrugged and turned to walk them back.

"And you best not be getting any ideas, young lord," Jory said good-naturedly, ruffling Bran's hair as he passed. Bran wrinkled up his nose and buried his hand further in Symeon's ruff, but started walking back too.

"He hasn't been," Arya said, watching Nymeria snuff at the weeds they passed as they walked back to the road. "He's _boring_."

_And_ he hadn't told them about his dreams. Bran had been the only one, when Father had asked, who'd said he'd not dreamed of anything at all that night. Arya didn't believe it for a second. Symeon had barked and barked just like the other wolves had, and Bran's face had been damp and red with tears just like everyone else's.

Arya wondered what had been so terrible that Bran wouldn't say anything about it at all. After all, Robb and Jon had told all three of their dreams, and Sansa had said she'd seen something with long curling arms tear Lady into bits, and Rickon had howled as loud as his wolf when Mother had asked him to say more about the lion.

And she'd told Father and Mother and the King her dragon dreams, both of them. She had sniffled into Nymeria's fur so they wouldn't see her cry, and so she didn't have to see them while she explained something so stupid. They had just been _dreams_, nothing she ought to have to tell the King of Westeros.

She shivered in the humid air and tried to think of something else. If she thought too hard about it, then she'd feel the cold jaws around her body— the long, hot fall from the sky.

Getting back on her horse felt like the worst kind of torture. The Kingsroad was maybe the most boring part of the whole journey south. Every day they'd pass exciting things, like Castle Cerwyn, or the Barrows of the First Men, or the Tyroshi with their forked dyed beards trundling their wares from White Harbour, but every day they'd pass over them and move on. Today, finally, they'd stopped somewhere interesting for lunch, and they hadn't even stopped that long. She badly wanted to whine to Father, _you'd promised us an hour_, but he had been quiet ever since the night of the dreams, even quieter than usual, and he hadn't been happy even to let her and Bran explore.

She had at least been looking forward to Harrenhal, near the end of their journey, but they were going to some inn nearby instead, she had heard one of the Kingsguard talking about it.

Arya really wanted to spar with Needle, but she knew she couldn't risk taking it from its hiding-place in her trunk just yet. Mycah had promised to teach her once they reached the Trident, and she'd just have to wait 'til then.

At least, today, she got to be on her horse. All day yesterday, she had to ride with Sansa in the Queen's wheelhouse. Queen Cersei was boring, and rude: she spent the whole time keeping Tommen and Myrcella from looking out the window, and because they weren't allowed to, Sansa said that _they_ weren't allowed to. And Septa Mordane had said it was an honour: it was boring was what it was. Arya had hoped Prince Joffrey would have been there, so she could ask him about the lion, but he'd chosen that day to ride ahead, of course. Sansa had seemed relieved he wasn't there.

They rode slow all day, as they did every day, so that the wheelhouse didn't get left behind. It was colder than yesterday, and it snowed a little, but the further south they go, the faster the snow melts. The southron riders always look nervously at the sky, Arya had noticed, when the snow falls.She supposed King's Landing didn't get many summer snows.

A cold day always leads to a clear night, and when they finally made camp for the night, the moon's turn shone bright and clear in the sky, almost as bright as the sun. Arya wished they had made camp at Moat Cailin instead: then there'd be something to see, and lizard-lions to spot. This is high forested ground, a dull clearing near a small hamlet. She watched the servants carry her trunks into her tent. She knew which one had Needle in it.

When Septa Mordane and Sansa were finally asleep that night, Arya unpacked her trunk, as quick and quiet as she could. Needle's sheath glittered in the moonlight filtering through the tent's roof. Lady woke up as she and Nymeria crept from the tent, but only blinked her large yellow eyes and returned her large head to her paws.

There were Kingsguard and courtiers and servants everywhere: the King's camp never really sleeps. Arya knows, though, that none of them go near their tents, because they all mistrust their direwolves. She made a direct path from her tent to the nearby forest, and nobody notices her go. Nymeria makes for a great sneaking companion: she's quiet and fast, and Arya's been training her not to howl when the hunting dogs howl.

Arya did not walk far: she wanted to keep close enough that she wouldn't get lost in the dark. Father's tent was right next to hers: if she called from here, he'd hear her.

She unsheathed Needle. It was still almost unbelievable to think that it was hers: it was so sharp and beautiful that it seemed impossible that she could own such a thing. She held it out in front of her, and tilted it this way and that so that the moon ran off the steel, like melted silver.

Then Nymeria growled.

Nymeria's big ruff of fur had risen up, stuck on edge like a thousand pins in her fur, and she was growling at a rustling in the trees, coming the other direction from the camp. Arya could feel her arms prickle and a cool rush of fear in her head. The direwolf's yellow teeth bared. Nymeria came over to stand between Arya and the mysterious rustling, her swishing tail warm against her leg. The warmth gave her courage.

"Who is it?" She demanded. She held Needle out in front of her, pointy end levelled at the bushes and trees.

The rustling got louder, and as a dark shape emerged from the shadows she could see it carried a sword. Fear overtook her again. If she screamed loud enough, perhaps Father would hear―

The figure dropped the sword and raised his hands.

"No harm meant," he said, and it was Jaime Lannister, the Kingslayer. The moon was obscured by the trees overhead, but Arya could still see his golden armour, blond hair and white cloak. He glanced down at Nymeria and looked worried. "Call off your wolf."

Nymeria didn't want to be called off. Arya had never seen her this angry: the direwolf looked close to pouncing. The Kingslayer flicked his eyes down to Needle.

"Does your father know you have that?" he said, a corner of his lip curling up a little. Arya's eyes widened.

"Down, Nymeria." The direwolf, for a moment, did not respond; it just continued to slowly inch forward, crouched low and growling, preparing to strike. If Nymeria bit him, Arya could see she would lose Needle, and probably never get another one again.

"_Down_, Nymeria!" she insisted, and the wolf relented; her ruff of fur stayed raised, but she stopped baring her teeth, and slinked behind Arya, all the time keeping her eyes locked on the Kingslayer. Arya slowly lowered Needle's point from where she'd aimed it to his belly.

"Better," Jaime Lannister said. "Keep your dog on a leash." With that, and with an exaggeratedly slow gesture, he picked up his sword by the blade— it was wood, Arya realised— and walked on past her, rustling through the undergrowth again and into the shadows.

Arya shivered. She had just held up her sword against the Kingslayer. Would she get in trouble? Would he tell on her anyway and get her sword taken? She entertained a brief, terrifying thought; of Nymeria chained in a pen, of her sword shattered in bits and thrown in the Fever River, and of Father sending her back to Winterfell to sit and sew.

She thought of Winterfell. She thought of a dragon crushing her bit by bit in its mouth, and the taste of its flame.

She blinked the dream away, hard enough to make her eyes hurt, and chopped again at the bush hard enough to crack the branch. Nymeria growled low and harsh again, and she turned around to see the Kingslayer was still there, and was _watching_ her. His tall silhouette and his stillness chilled her as much as the dream had. _Why was he still_ _here_?

"No," the Kingslayer said, "No, that won't do. You never use an edged blade to drill."

Arya furrowed her eyebrows, and the Kingslayer held up his wooden sword, clutching it by the blade part as if to demonstrate its lack of edge.

"You'll roll the edge hitting it that hard, or snap it in two. It's a poor way to treat good steel."

He flipped the wooden sword, hilt facing towards her, and threw it a little way ahead of him, to the wet dirt. Nymeria jolted as the sword thumped down and snarled at it, then the Kingslayer, in a way that seemed to crack at the back of her throat. Arya put Needle in her other hand, and stepped forward. She picked the wooden longsword up by the hilt. It was so heavy she couldn't even hold it properly in one hand; she had to let the end drag against the ground.

The Kingslayer looked at her like he expected her to do something, and she looked down at it and let the useless thing thump back down to the ground. "It's too heavy," she said.

"If you didn't have that little sword of your own," Jaime said, "Would you use the sword you could find, or would you let your opponent kill you?"

Arya glared. "I'd use it, obviously."

"Then get used to it being heavy."

"I have _my_ sword."

"And a fine piece too," the Kingslayer replied. "But young ladies do not carry swords. If you're attacked on an hour you do not have your…"

The Kingslayer tilted his head to her sword.

"Needle," Arya said, clutching the hilt a little tighter.

"Your Needle there," he said, "What then? Do you scream for help? Stand and fight?"

"Fight," she said, like it was obvious, thinking guiltily about how close she'd come to calling for Father.

"Hard to fight without a sword," he says. "How much do you know about fighting, truly? Have you been trained?"

"Lots," she said in a rush. "Mycah teaches me all the time, I know lots."

"Mycah?" The Kingslayer frowned. "And what, exactly, is a Mycah?"

"He knows how to spar," Arya said. "He's a butcher's son, spends all _day_ holding knives. He's taught me."

The Kingslayer exhaled through his nose sharply. If Arya could read his face better in the dark, she'd be able to tell if he thought that was funny or not. "And what has this butcher's son taught you?"

"I know blocks and cuts," she said, trying to think of anything she'd heard Robb or Jon say; she didn't think 'stick 'em with the pointy end' would gain her any favours. "All kinds of them." She held up Needle above her head to demonstrate the block all the southron swordsmen used.

"'Blocks'," the Kingslayer said. "You mean guards."

"We call it something different in the North," Arya insisted. "You must not have heard of it."

"I suppose I must not have," he said. "Show me a block, then."

Arya had watched her brothers fight for years with Ser Rodrik and yet every lesson she'd ever stolen glances of had disappeared from her head. She twisted her mouth up.

"No."

"No?"

"I don't want to," she said, letting the tourney sword lower in her hand to the ground, holding Needle a little tighter.

"A block," The Kingslayer said, "Is when you hold off a blade's edge with your own. A _guard_ is what you did. Either your butcher's boy is a fool or he's a liar. Which is he?"

Arya's face was hot with anger and embarrassment. She tried to think of what answer to give.

"No matter," the Kingslayer cut in quickly. "Your butcher's boy might hold knives and get into spats in the courtyard, but he is not a swordsman, and he is not a master of arms. Never trust the advice gleaned from fools."

"Mycah is _not_ a fool," Arya said before she can help herself.

The Kingslayer did that nose exhale laugh again. He reached out and snapped, then twisted off, a long switch of wood from a bush. He levelled it in front of him, inspected it, plucked off a few leaves, and then held it low at his side. "Block me, then."

He moved like lightning. Arya, in a rush of fear as the dark silhouette swept forward, dropped the wooden sword entirely, jabbing Needle at the Kingslayer. The switch snapped against her belly, the Kingslayer sweeping by her like a shadow. Needle didn't even cut his cloak.

Nymeria snapped at the air the Kingslayer had been in just a moment before, and started to rise, but Arya put a hand on her head and pushed it firmly down. Arya had a sword, and a direwolf, and the Kingslayer had given himself a twig. It's hard to be _that_ scared, really, of a Kingsguard who arms himself with a twig. Not to mention, he was Robert Baratheon's sworn sword, and her father was Robert's best friend, so it would be insanity for the Lannister to actually harm her.

The Kingslayer had returned to stand exactly where he had stood before, leant casually against a tree trunk.

"Poor form," he said. "First you drop your sword, and then you use steel to spar. Still, not the worst I've seen. Your reflexes are there."

"How am I meant to block you if you go that fast?" Arya said, the rush of fear to her head warming her and making her brave. "Go slower."

"How _often_ do you think the people swinging a sword at you are going to go slower just because you asked? I'm an opponent, not one of your father's men. Get used to it being fast." He gestured to the wooden sword on the floor. "Put away the edged steel before you injure your dog, and hold the sword with both hands."

She sheathed Needle, picked the wooden sword up, and held it in her hands. The Kingslayer tilted his head at her in the dark. The moon emerged through the trees: Aryas saw Jaime's expression for the first time. He was frowning at her hands holding the sword.

"What hand do you write with?"

"My left," she said. In the moonlight, she could see him smile at that, and she frowned. "_What?_ The Sword of the Morning fought with his left!"

"_Arthur Dayne_," Jaime said, still clearly finding something funny, "Could fight with his right hand as well as he could his left, and only bards carry that 'left hand sword' rumour."

"Father told us, and he _knows_! He defeated the Sword of the Morning, in single combat!"

Something shifted in Jaime's face. "I think that had little to do with the hand he fought with. Put your left hand high, against the crossguard. Right hand low, near the pommel."

She did it. He nodded. "In time, you'll have to learn to hold it one-handed, but if you had to fight for your life tonight, you would hold it in both hands, and so we'll start there. In the army, we don't allow a man to hold a blade in his left hand: Lannister footsoldiers hold their shields in the left, spears in the right, and any man out of formation is a liability."

Arya interrupted, confused. "In the army?" she asked. "I thought Kingsguard don't fight in any army."

"They don't," Jaime said. He blinked at her. "No, they don't. Knowledge of military strategy is a necessary need for any swordsman. You, however, are not in the northern army, nor should you wish to be. If you ever find yourself in need of a sword in your hand, you're likely to be fighting in single combat, and when you are, you're going to be at an advantage fighting with your left hand."

"Why?"

Jaime hesitated, and then switched the twig from his right hand to his left.

"Strike at me, _slowly_. Like you're stuck in treacle. Push the sword with your left hand and let the right hand take the weight."

Arya started a swing, slow like he said to. She tried to do it like Robb and Jon and Theon do: one foot steps forward, and you raise the sword from low to high. It was really heavy, even holding it with two hands, but she tried not to show that her arms were shaking from the weight. Jaime moved slow too, the twig moving to block the sword. Nymeria was watching carefully, big grey eyes shiny in the moonlight, but when they moved this slowly, she didn't snap at them or growl.

"And lower it."

She dropped it down instantly, her arms aching. He switched the twig from his left hand to his right.

"And again. Just the same as you did it before."

Arya copied the same movement again, but this time she saw the difference: to meet her sword, he had to do a lot more moving to meet his stick to the blade part.

"And down."

She lowered it again, rubbing at one wrist with the other.

"Do you see why?"

"It's easier to get them before they get you," she said.

"Not… exactly," he said. "Yes, if they're a poor swordsman. But it forces them to fight in a way they aren't accustomed to. You, on the other hand, will be fighting in the way you're used to, and so you gain an advantage."

"Why doesn't _everyone_ just train with their left hand, then?"

Jaime looked up to the moon in the sky, and, briefly, mouthed something she couldn't lip-read.

"How often do you train your right hand to write words?" He said.

"Sometimes," Arya said, which was true. "Maester Luwin says that the King's Hand is always the _right_ hand, not the left."

"Maester Luwin might have a point," Jaime commented. "But hold the sword in your left. Or, with two hands, left in front. You might find it harder at the bind, but that's an issue for another time."

"_Another_ time?" she said. Jaime made a vague gesture with the hand not holding the stick. He didn't say anything for a moment.

"Well," he said. "If you want to know how to hold a sword, and you're travelling with the Kingsguard, what would be the point in asking a butcher's boy?"

"_You'd_ teach me how to fight?" Arya asked. She wasn't sure if this was some kind of funny joke to the Kingslayer.

"As your father so often reminds us," Jaime said, "Winter is coming. Even ladies have use of swords in winter."

"I'm not a lady," Arya said. "Sansa's a _lady_. Even her wolf's a _lady_. That's not me."

"Fine," he said. "Then don't be. The king rides each dawn: I'll expect to see you awake and dressed an hour before sunrise. There's two weeks before we reach King's Landing: if you haven't sickened of it by then, we'll see what can be made of you."

Then, the Kingslayer stepped back and looked at her, up and down. That frown had come back.

"You won't enjoy it," he warned. "Every person you attack is likely to be larger and stronger than you are, and unless they're a babe in arms, more proficient with a sword. It's going to take twice as long for you to get any strength in your sword arm."

"I can do it," Arya said. "I promise, I'll be up every morning! I'm better than half my brothers at archery. Way better than Bran, and he even wants to be a knight, but I want to fight with Needle."

The moon went behind the trees again. Nymeria's eyes still shone in the dark, and so did the Kingslayer's golden armour. The Kingslayer's face slid beneath the shadows.

"Get some sleep," Jaime said. "We start tomorrow."


End file.
